MY    BOYHOOD 


BY 


JOHN  BURROUGHS 

WITH     AN     INTRODUCTION      BY     HIS     SON 

JULIAN   BURROUGHS 


Slab  sides  " 


MY     BOYHOOD 


BY 


JOHN  BURROUGHS 

WITH    A    CONCLUSION    BY 
HIS    SON 

JULIAN    BURROUGHS 


ILLUSTRATIONS  FROM  PHOTO 
GRAPHS  AND  FROM  PAINTINGS 
BY  JULIAN  BURROUGHS 


GARDEN    CITY  NEW    YORK 

DOUBLEDAY,   PAGE    &  COMPANY 
1922 


COPYRIGHT,  1922,  BY 
DOUBLEDAY,  PAGE  &  COMPANY 

ALL   RIGHTS   RESERVED,    INCLUDING   THAT   OF  TRANSLATION 
INTO  FOREIGN   LANGUAGES,  INCLUDING  THE  SCANDINAVIAN 

COPYRIGHT    1921,    1922,    BY   HARPER    &    BROTHERS 

PRINTED  IN  THE  UNITED  STATES 

AT 
THE  COUNTRY  LIFE  FRESS,  GARDEN  CITY,  N.  Y. 


FOREWORD 

IN  THE  beginning,  at  least,  Father  wrote 
these  sketches  of  his  boyhood  and  early 
farm  life  as  a  matter  of  self-defense:  I  had 
made  a  determined  attempt  to  write  them 
and  when  I  did  this  I  was  treading  on  what 
was  to  him  more  or  less  sacred  ground, 
for  as  he  once  said  in  a  letter  to  me,  "You 
will  be  homesick;  I  know  just  how  I  felt 
when  I  left  home  forty-three  years  ago. 
And  I  have  been  more  or  less  homesick  ever 
since.  The  love  of  the  old  hills  and  of  Father 
and  Mother  is  deep  in  the  very  foundations 
of  my  being."  He  had  an  intense  love  of  his 
birthplace  and  cherished  every  memory  of 
his  boyhood  and  of  his  family  and  of  the  old 
farm  high  up  on  the  side  of  Old  Clump — 
"the  mountain  out  of  whose  loins  I  sprang" 
— so  that  when  I  tried  to  write  of  him  he 
felt  it  was  time  he  took  the  matter  in  hand. 
The  following  pages  are  the  result. 

JULIAN  BURROUGHS. 


494509 


CONTENTS 

FACE 

MY  BOYHOOD    , i 

By  John  Burroughs 

MY  FATHER 135 

By  Julian  Burroughs 


LIST  OF  COLOUR  ILLUSTRATIONS 
Slabsides    .......     Frontispiece 

FACING  PAGE 

Old  Clump     .........      88 


LIST  OF  HALF-TONE  ILLUSTRATIONS 


FACING  PAGE 


Still  collecting  sap  for  maple  sugar    .  8 

Sugaring-off  at  Riverby  ....     *  24 

John  Burroughs  at  work  in  the  old  barn  40 

John  Burroughs  and  his  grandchild  .  56 

At  Woodchuck  Lodge,  Roxbury,N.Y.  120 

Setting  up  a  home  for  the  birds     .     .  136 

Actively  at  work  at  eighty  ....  168 

At  the  study  at  Riverby       ....  184 


MY  BOYHOOD 

BY 

JOHN  BURROUGHS 


MY  BOYHOOD 

BY 

JOHN  BURROUGHS 

YOU  ask  me  to  give  you  some  account 
of  my  life — how  it  was  with  me,  and 
now  in  my  seventy-sixth  year  I  find 
myself  in  the  mood  to  do  so.  You  know 
enough  about  me  to  know  that  it  will  not  be 
an  exciting  narrative  or  of  any  great  histor 
ical  value.  It  is  mainly  the  life  of  a  country 
man  and  a  rather  obscure  man  of  letters, 
lived  in  eventful  times  indeed,  but  largely 
lived  apart  from  the  men  and  events  that 
have  given  character  to  the  last  three  quar 
ters  of  a  century.  Like  tens  of  thousands 
of  others,  I  have  been  a  spectator  of,  rather 
than  a  participator  in,  the  activities — politi 
cal,  commercial,  sociological,  scientific — of 
the  times  in  which  I  have  lived.  My  life, 
like  your  own,  has  been  along  the  by-paths 


8r*V  MY     BOYHOOD 

rather  than  along  the  great  public  highways. 
I  have  known  but  few  great  men  and  have 
played  no  part  in  any  great  public  events — 
not  even  in  the  Civil  War  which  I  lived 
through  and  in  which  my  duty  plainly  called 
me  to  take  part.  I  am  a  man  who  recoils 
from  noise  and  strife,  even  from  fair  compe 
tition,  and  who  likes  to  see  his  days  "linked 
each  to  each"  by  some  quiet,  congenial 
occupation. 

The  first  seventeen  years  of  my  life  were 
spent  on  the  farm  where  I  was  born  (1837- 
1854);  the  next  ten  years  I  was  a  teacher 
in  rural  district  schools  (1854-1864);  then  I 
was  for  ten  years  a  government  clerk  in 
Washington  (1864-1873);  then  in  the  sum 
mer  of  1873,  while  a  national  bank  examiner 
and  bank  receiver,  I  purchased  the  small 
fruit  farm  on  the  Hudson  where  you  were 
brought  up  and  where  I  have  since  lived, 
cultivating  the  land  for  marketable  fruit  and 
the  fields  and  woods  for  nature  literature,  as 
you  well  know.  I  have  gotten  out  of  my 
footpaths  a  few  times  and  traversed  some  of 


MY     BOYHOOD  3 

the  great  highways  of  travel — have  been 
twice  to  Europe,  going  only  as  far  as  Paris 
(1871  and  1882) — the  first  time  sent  to  Lon 
don  by  the  Government  with  three  other 
men  to  convey  $50,000,000  of  bonds  to  be 
refunded;  the  second  time  going  with  my 
family  on  my  own  account.  I  was  a  mem 
ber  of  the  Harriman  expedition  to  Alaska  in 
the  summer  of  1899,  going  as  far  as  Plover 
Bay  on  the  extreme  N.  E.  part  of  Siberia. 
I  was  the  companion  of  President  Roosevelt 
on  a  trip  to  Yellowstone  Park  in  the  spring 
of  1903.  In  the  winter  and  spring  of  1909 
I  went  to  California  with  two  women  friends 
and  extended  the  journey  to  the  Hawaiian 
Islands,  returning  home  in  June.  In  1911  I 
again  crossed  the  continent  to  California. 
I  have  camped  and  tramped  in  Maine  and 
in  Canada,  and  have  spent  part  of  a  winter 
in  Bermuda  and  in  Jamaica.  This  is  an 
outline  of  my  travels.  I  have  known  but 
few  great  men.  I  met  Carlyle  in  the  com 
pany  of  Moncure  Conway  in  London  in 
November,  1871.  I  met  Emerson  three 


4  MY    BOYHOOD 

times — in  1863  at  West  Point;  in  1871  in 
Baltimore  and  Washington,  where  I  heard 
him  lecture;  and  at  the  Holmes  birthday 
breakfast  in  Boston  in  1879.     I  knew  Walt 
Whitman   intimately  from    1863   until   his 
death   in    1892.     I   have  met   Lowell   and 
Whittier,  but  not   Longfellow  or   Bryant; 
I  have  seen  Lincoln,  Grant,  Sherman,  Early, 
Sumner,   Garfield,    Cleveland,    and    other 
notable  men  of  those  days.     I  heard  Tyn- 
dall  deliver  his  course  of  lectures  on  Light 
in  Washington  in  1870  or  '71,  but  missed 
seeing  Huxley  during  his  visit  here.     I  dined 
with  the  Rossettis  in  London  in  1871,  but 
was  not  impressed  by  them  nor  they  by  me. 
I  met  Matthew  Arnold  in  New  York  and 
heard  his  lecture  on  Emerson.     My  books 
are,  in  a  way,  a  record  of  my  life — that  part 
of   it    that    came    to   flower   and   fruit   in 
my    mind.     You    could    reconstruct    my 
days  pretty  well  from  those  volumes.      A 
writer  who  gleans  his  literary  harvest  in 
the  fields  and  woods  reaps  mainly  where 
he  has  sown  himself.     He  is  a   husband- 


MYBOYHOOD  5 

man  whose  crop  springs  from  the  seed  of 
his  own  heart. 

My  life  has  been  a  fortunate  one;  I  was 
born  under  a  lucky  star.  It  seems  as  if 
both  wind  and  tide  had  favoured  me.  I 
have  suffered  no  great  losses,  or  defeats,  or 
illness,  or  accidents,  and  have  undergone 
no  great  struggles  or  privations;  I  have  had 
no  grouch,  I  have  not  wanted  the  earth. 
I  am  pessimistic  by  night,  but  by  day  I  am  a 
confirmed  optimist,  and  it  is  the  days  that 
have  stamped  my  life.  I  have  found  this 
planet  a  good  corner  of  the  universe  to  live 
in  and  I  am  not  in  a  hurry  to  exchange  it 
for  any  other.  I  hope  the  joy  of  living  may 
be  as  keen  with  you,  my  dear  boy,  as  it  has 
been  with  me  and  that  you  may  have  life 
on  as  easy  terms  as  I  have.  With  this  fore 
word  I  will  begin  the  record  in  more  detail. 

I  have  spoken  of  my  good  luck.  It  began 
in  my  being  born  on  a  farm,  of  parents  in 
the  prime  of  their  days,  and  in  humble  cir 
cumstances.  I  deem  it  good  luck,  too,  that 


6  MYBOYHOOD 

my  birth  fell  in  April,  a  month  in  which  so 
many  other  things  find  it  good  to  begin  life. 
Father  probably  tapped  the  sugar  bush 
about  this  time  or  a  little  earlier;  the  blue 
bird  and  the  robin  and  song  sparrow  may 
have  arrived  that  very  day.  New  calves 
were  bleating  in  the  barn  and  young  lambs 
under  the  shed.  There  were  earth-stained 
snow  drifts  on  the  hillside,  and  along  the 
stone  walls  and  through  the  forests  that 
covered  the  mountains  the  coat  of  snow 
showed  unbroken.  The  fields  were  gener 
ally  bare  and  the  frost  was  leaving  the 
ground.  The  stress  of  winter  was  over 
and  the  warmth  of  spring  began  to  be  felt 
in  the  air.  I  had  come  into  a  household  of 
five  children,  two  girls  and  three  boys,  the 
oldest  ten  years  and  the  youngest  two. 
One  had  died  in  infancy,  making  me  the 
seventh  child.  Mother  was  twenty-nine  and 
father  thirty-five,  a  medium-sized,  freckled, 
red-haired  man,  showing  very  plainly  the 
Celtic  or  Welsh  strain  in  his  blood,  as 
did  mother,  who  was  a  Kelly  and  of  Irish 


MYBOYHOOD  7 

extraction  on  the  paternal  side.  I  had 
come  into  a  family  of  neither  wealth  nor 
poverty  as  those  things  were  looked  upon 
in  those  days,  but  a  family  dedicated  to  hard 
work  winter  and  summer  in  paying  for  and 
improving  a  large  farm,  in  a  country  of  wide 
open  valleys  and  long,  broad-backed  hills 
and  gentle  flowing  mountain  lines;  very 
old  geologically,  but  only  one  generation 
from  the  stump  in  the  history  of  the  settle 
ment.  Indeed,  the  stumps  lingered  in  many 
of  the  fields  late  into  my  boyhood,  and  one 
of  my  tasks  in  the  dry  mid-spring  weather 
was  to  burn  these  stumps — an  occupation  I 
always  enjoyed  because  the  adventure  of  it 
made  play  of  the  work.  The  climate  was 
severe  in  winter,  the  mercury  often  dropping 
to  30°  below,  though  we  then  had  no  ther 
mometer  to  measure  it,  and  the  summers,  at 
an  altitude  of  two  thousand  feet,  cool  and 
salubrious.  The  soil  was  fairly  good,  though 
encumbered  with  the  laminated  rock  and 
stones  of  the  Catskill  formation,  which  the 
old  ice  sheet  had  broken  and  shouldered 


8  MY    BOYHOOD 

and  transported  about.  About  every  five 
or  six  acres  had  loose  stones  and  rock  enough 
to  put  a  rock-bottomed  wall  around  it  and 
still  leave  enough  in  and  on  the  soil  to  worry 
the  ploughman  and  the  mower.  All  the  farms 
in  that  section  reposing  in  the  valleys  and 
bending  up  and  over  the  broad-backed  hills 
are  checker-boards  of  stone  walls,  and  the 
right-angled  fields,  in  their  many  colours  of 
green  and  brown  and  yellow  and  red,  give  a 
striking  map-like  appearance  to  the  land 
scape.  Good  crops  of  grain,  such  as  rye, 
oats,  buckwheat,  and  yellow  corn,  are 
grown,  but  grass  is  the  most  natural  prod 
uct.  It  is  a  grazing  country  and  the  dairy 
cow  thrives  there,  and  her  products  are  the 
chief  source  of  the  incomes  of  the  farms. 

I  had  come  into  a  home  where  all  the 
elements  were  sweet;  the  water  and  the  air 
as  good  as  there  is  in  the  world,  and  where 
the  conditions  of  life  were  of  a  temper  to 
discipline  both  mind  and  body.  The  set 
tlers  of  my  part  of  the  Catskills  were  largely 
from  Connecticut  and  Long  Island,  coming 


MYBOYHOOD  9 

in  after  or  near  the  close  of  the  Revolution, 
and  with  a  good  mixture  of  Scotch  emi 
grants. 

My  great-grandfather,  Ephraim  Bur 
roughs,  came,  with  his  family  of  eight  or 
ten  children,  from  near  Danbury,  Conn., 
and  settled  in  the  town  of  Stamford  shortly 
after  the  Revolution.  He  died  there  in 
1818.  My  grandfather,  Eden,  came  into 
the  town  of  Roxbury,  then  a  part  of  Ulster 
County. 

I  had  come  into  a  land  flowing  with  milk, 
if  not  with  honey.  The  maple  syrup  may 
very  well  take  the  place  of  the  honey.  The 
sugar  maple  was  the  dominant  tree  in  the 
woods  and  the  maple  sugar  the  principal 
sweetening  used  in  the  family.  Maple, 
beech,  and  birch  wood  kept  us  warm  in 
winter,  and  pine  and  hemlock  timber  made 
from  trees  that  grew  in  the  deeper  valleys 
formed  the  roofs  and  the  walls  of  the  houses. 
The  breath  of  kine  early  mingled  with  my 
own  breath.  From  my  earliest  memory 
the  cow  was  the  chief  factor  on  the  farm 


IO  MYBOYHOOD 

and  her  products  the  main  source  of  the 
family  income;  around  her  revolved  the  hay 
ing  and  the  harvesting.  It  was  for  her  that 
we  toiled  from  early  July  until  late  August, 
gathering  the  hay  into  the  barns  or  into  the 
stacks,  mowing  and  raking  it  by  hand. 
That  was  the  day  of  the  scythe  and  the  good 
mower,  of  Hie  cradle  and  the  good  cradler,  of 
the  pitchfork  and  the  good  pitcher.  With 
the  modern  agricultural  machinery  the  same 
crops  are  gathered  now  with  less  than  half 
the  outlay  of  human  energy,  but  the  type  of 
farmer  seems  to  have  deteriorated  in  about 
the  same  proportion.  The  third  generation 
of  farmers  in  my  native  town  are  much  like 
the  third  steeping  of  tea,  or  the  third  crop 
of  corn  where  no  fertilizers  have  been  used. 
The  large,  picturesque,  and  original  charac 
ters  who  improved  the  farms  and  paid  for 
them  are  about  all  gone,  and  their  descen 
dants  have  deserted  the  farms  or  are  dis 
tinctly  of  an  inferior  type.  The  farms  keep 
more  stock  and  yield  better  crops,  owing 
to  the  amount  of  imported  grain  consumed 


MYBOYHOOD  II 

upon  them,  but  the  families  have  dwindled 
or  gone  out  entirely,  and  the  social  and  the 
neighbourhood  spirit  is  not  the  same.  No 
more  huskings  or  quiltings,  or  apple  cuts,  or 
raisings  or  "bees"  of  any  sort.  The  tele 
phone  and  the  rural  free  delivery  have  come 
and  the  automobile  and  the  daily  news 
paper.  The  roads  are  better,  communica 
tion  quicker,  and  the  houses  and  barns 
more  showy,  but  the  men  and  the  women, 
and  especially  the  children,  are  not  there. 
The  towns  and  the  cities  are  now  colouring 
and  dominating  the  country  which  they 
have  depleted  of  its  men,  and  the  rural 
districts  are  becoming  a  faded  replica  of 
town  life. 

The  farm  work  to  which  I  was  early  called 
upon  to  lend  a  hand,  as  I  have  said,  revolved 
around  the  dairy  cow.  Her  paths  were 
in  the  fields  and  woods,  her  sonorous  voice 
was  upon  the  hills,  her  fragrant  breath  was 
upon  every  breeze.  She  was  the  centre  of 
our  industries.  To  keep  her  in  good  condi 
tion,  well  pastured  in  summer  and  well 


12  MY    BOYHOOD 

housed  and  fed  in  winter,  and  the  whole 
dairy  up  to  its  highest  point  of  efficiency — 
to  this  end  the  farmer  directed  his  efforts. 
It  was  an  exacting  occupation.  In  summer 
the  day  began  with  the  milking  and  ended 
with  the  milking;  and  in  winter  it  began 
with  the  foddering  and  ended  with  the 
foddering,  and  the  major  part  of  the  work 
between  and  during  both  seasons  had  for  its 
object,  directly  or  indirectly,  the  well-being 
of  the  herd.  Getting  the  cows  and  turning 
away  the  cows  in  summer  was  usually  the 
work  of  the  younger  boys;  turning  them 
out  of  the  stable  and  putting  them  back  in 
winter  was  usually  the  work  of  the  older. 
The  foddering  them  from  the  stack  in  the 
field  in  winter  also  fell  to  the  lot  of  the  older 
members  of  the  family. 

In  milking  we  all  took  a  hand  when  we 
had  reached  the  age  of  about  ten  years, 
Mother  and  my  sisters  usually  doing  their 
share.  At  first  we  milked  the  cows  in  the 
road  in  front  of  the  house,  setting  the  pails 
of  milk  on  the  stone  work;  later  we  milked 


MYBOYHOOD  13 

them  in  a  yard  in  the  orchard  behind  the 
house,  and  of  late  years  the  milking  is  done 
in  the  stable.  Mother  said  that  when  they 
first  came  upon  the  farm,  as  she  sat  milking 
a  cow  in  the  road  one  evening,  she  saw  a 
large  black  animal  come  out  of  the  woods 
out  where  the  clover  meadow  now  is,  and 
cross  the  road  and  disappear  in  the  woods 
on  the  other  side.  Bears  sometimes  carried 
off  the  farmers'  hogs  in  those  days,  boldly 
invading  the  pens  to  do  so.  My  father 
kept  about  thirty  cows  of  the  Durham 
breed ;  now  the  dairy  herds  are  made  up  of 
Jerseys  or  Holsteins.  Then  the  product 
that  went  to  market  was  butter,  now  it  is 
milk.  Then  the  butter  was  made  on  the 
farm  by  the  farmer's  wife  or  the  hired  girl, 
now  it  is  made  in  the  creameries  by  men. 
My  mother  made  most  of  the  butter  for 
nearly  forty  years,  packing  thousands  of 
tubs  and  firkins  of  it  in  that  time.  The 
milk  was  set  in  tin  pans  on  a  rack  in  the 
milk  house  for  the  cream  to  rise,  and  as 
soon  as  the  milk  clabbered  it  was  skimmed. 


14  MY     BOYHOOD 

About  three  o'clock  in  the  afternoon  during 
the  warm  weather  Mother  would  begin 
skimming  the  milk,  carrying  it  pan  by  pan 
to  the  big  cream  pan,  where  with  a  quick 
movement  of  a  case  knife  the  cream  was 
separated  from  the  sides  of  the  pan,  the 
pan  tilted  on  the  edge  of  the  cream  pan  and 
the  heavy  mantle  of  cream,  in  folds  or 
flakes,  slid  off  into  the  receptacle  and  the 
thick  milk  emptied  into  pails  to  be  carried 
to  the  swill  barrel  for  the  hogs.  I  used  to 
help  Mother  at  times  by  handing  her  the 
pans  of  milk  from  the  rack  and  emptying 
the  pails.  Then  came  the  washing  of  the 
pans  at  the  trough,  at  which  I  also  often 
aided  her  by  standing  the  pans  up  to  dry 
and  sun  on  the  big  bench.  Rows  of  drying 
tin  pans  were  always  a  noticeable  feature 
about  farmhouses  in  those  days,  also  the 
churning  machine  attached  to  the  milk 
house  and  the  sound  of  the  wheel,  propelled 
by  the  "old  churner" — either  a  big  dog  or 
a  wether  sheep.  Every  summer  morning  by 
eight  o'clock  the  old  sheep  or  the  old  dog 


MY     BOYHOOD  15 

was  brought  and  tied  to  his  task  upon  the 
big  wheel.  Sheep  were  usually  more  un 
willing  churners  than  were  the  dogs.  They 
rarely  acquired  any  sense  of  duty  or  obe 
dience  as  a  dog  did.  This  endless  walking 
and  getting  nowhere  very  soon  called  forth 
vigorous  protests.  The  churner  would  pull 
back,  brace  himself,  choke,  and  stop  the 
machine:  one  churner  threw  himself  off  and 
was  choked  to  death  before  he  was  discov 
ered.  I  remember  when  the  old  hetchel 
from  the  day  of  flax  dressing,  fastened  to  a 
board,  did  duty  behind  the  old  churner, 
spurring  him  up  with  its  score  or  more  of 
sharp  teeth  when  he  settled  back  to  stop  the 
machine.  "Run  and  start  the  old  sheep/' 
was  a  command  we  heard  less  often  after 
that.  He  could  not  long  hold  out  against 
the  pressure  of  that  phalanx  of  sharp  points 
upon  his  broad  rear  end. 

The  churn  dog  was  less  obdurate  and  per 
verse,  but  he  would  sometimes  hide  away 
as  the  hour  of  churning  approached  and  we 
would  have  to  hustle  around  to  find  him. 


l6  MY    BOYHOOD 

But  we  had  one  dog  that  seemed  to  take 
pleasure  in  the  task  and  would  go  quickly 
to  the  wheel  when  told  to  and  finish  his 
task  without  being  tied.  In  the  absence  of 
both  dog  and  sheep,  I  have  a  few  times 
taken  their  place  on  the  wheel.  In  winter 
and  early  spring  there  was  less  cream  to 
churn  and  we  did  it  by  hand,  two  of  us 
lifting  the  dasher  together.  Heavy  work 
for  even  big  boys,  and  when  the  stuff  was 
reluctant  and  the  butter  would  not  come 
sometimes  until  the  end  of  an  hour,  the 
task  tried  our  mettle.  Sometimes  it  would 
not  gather  well  after  it  had  come,  then 
some  deft  handling  of  the  dasher  was  neces 
sary. 

I  never  tired  of  seeing  Mother  lift  the  great 
masses  of  golden  butter  from  the  churn  with 
her  ladle  and  pile  them  up  in  the  big  butter 
bowl,  with  the  drops  of  buttermilk  standing 
upon  them  as  if  they  were  sweating  from  the 
ordeal  they  had  been  put  through.  Then 
the  working  and  the  washing  of  it  to  free  it 
from  the  milk  and  the  final  packing  into  tub 


MY    BOYHOOD  17 

or  firkin,  its  fresh  odour  in  the  air — what  a 
picture  it  was!  How  much  of  the  virtue 
of  the  farm  went  each  year  into  those  fir 
kins!  Literally  the  cream  of  the  land. 
Ah,  the  alchemy  of  Life,  that  in  the  bee  can 
transform  one  product  of  those  wild  rough 
fields  into  honey,  and  in  the  cow  can  trans 
form  another  product  into  milk! 

The  spring  butter  was  packed  into  fifty- 
pound  tubs  to  be  shipped  to  market  as  fast 
as  made.  The  packing  into  one-hundred- 
pound  firkins  to  be  held  over  till  November 
did  not  begin  till  the  cows  were  turned  out 
to  pasture  in  May.  To  have  made  forty 
tubs  by  that  time  and  sold  them  for  eighteen 
or  twenty  cents  a  pound  was  considered  very 
satisfactory.  Then  to  make  forty  or  fifty 
firkins  during  the  summer  and  fall  and  to 
get  as  good  a  price  for  it  made  the  farmer's 
heart  glad.  When  Father  first  came  on  the 
farm,  in  1827,  butter  brought  only  twelve 
or  fourteen  cents  per  pound,  but  the  price 
steadily  crept  up  till  in  my  time  it  sold  from 
seventeen  to  eighteen  and  a  half.  The  fir- 


l8  MYBOYHOOD 

kin  butter  was  usually  sold  to  a  local  butter 
buyer  named  Dowie.  He  usually  appeared 
in  early  fall,  always  on  horseback,  having 
notified  Father  in  advance.  At  the  break 
fast  table  Father  would  say,  "Dowie is  com 
ing  to  try  the  butter  to-day/' 

"  I  hope  he  will  not  try  that  firkin  I  packed 
that  hot  week  in  July/'  Mother  would  say. 
But  very  likely  that  was  the  one  among 
others  he  would  ask  for.  His  long,  half- 
round  steel  butter  probe  or  tryer  was  thrust 
down  the  centre  of  the  firkin  to  the  bottom, 
given  a  turn  or  two,  and  withdrawn,  its 
tapering  cavity  filled  with  a  sample  of  every 
inch  of  butter  in  the  firkin.  Dowie  would 
pass  it  rapidly  to  and  fro  under  his  nose, 
maybe  sometimes  tasting  it,  then  push  the 
tryer  back  into  the  hole,  then  withdrawing 
it,  leaving  its  core  of  butter  where  it  found 
it.  If  the  butter  suited  him,  and  it  rarely 
failed  to  do  so,  he  would  make  his  offer  and 
ride  away  to  the  next  dairy. 

The  butter  had  always  to  be  delivered 
at  a  date  agreed  upon,  on  the  Hudson 


MY    BOYHOOD  19 

River  at  Catskill.  This  usually  took  place 
in  November.  It  was  the  event  of  the  fall: 
two  loads  of  butter,  of  twenty  or  more  fir 
kins  each,  to  be  transported  fifty  miles  in 
a  lumber  wagon,  each  round  trip  taking 
about  four  days.  The  firkins  had  to  be 
headed  up  and  gotten  ready.  This  job  in 
my  time  usually  fell  to  Hiram.  He  would 
begin  the  day  before  Father  was  to  start  and 
have  a  load  headed  and  placed  in  the  wagon 
on  time,  with  straw  between  the  firkins  so 
they  would  not  rub.  How  many  times  I 
have  heard  those  loads  start  off  over  the 
frozen  ground  in  the  morning  before  it  was 
light!  Sometimes  a  neighbour's  wagon 
would  go  slowly  jolting  by  just  after  or  just 
before  Father  had  started,  but  on  the  same 
errand.  Father  usually  took  a  bag  of  oats 
for  his  horses  and  a  box  of  food  for  himself 
so  as  to  avoid  all  needless  expenses.  The 
first  night  would  usually  find  him  in  Steel's 
tavern  in  Greene  County,  half  way  to  Cat- 
skill.  The  next  afternoon  would  find  him 
at  his  journey's  end  and  by  night  unloaded 


20  MY    BOYHOOD 

at  the  steamboat  wharf,  his  groceries  and 
other  purchases  made,  and  ready  for  an 
early  start  homeward  in  the  morning.  On 
the  fourth  night  we  would  be  on  the  lookout 
for  his  return.  Mother  would  be  sitting, 
sewing  by  the  light  of  her  tallow  dip,  with 
one  ear  bent  toward  the  road.  She  usually 
caught  the  sound  of  his  wagon  first.  "There 
comes  your  father,"  she  would  say,  and 
Hiram  or  Wilson  would  quickly  get  and 
light  the  old  tin  lantern  and  stand  ready  on 
the  stonework  to  receive  him  and  help  put 
out  the  team.  By  the  time  he  was  in  the 
house  his  supper  would  be  on  the  table — 
a  cold  pork  stew,  I  remember,  used  to  delight 
him  on  such  occasions,  and  a  cup  of  green 
tea.  After  supper  his  pipe,  and  the  story 
of  his  trip  told,  with  a  list  of  family  pur 
chases,  and  then  to  bed.  In  a  few  days 
the  second  trip  would  be  made.  As  his 
boys  grew  old  enough  he  gave  each  of  them 
in  turn  a  trip  with  him  to  Catskill.  It  was 
a  great  event  in  the  life  of  each  of  us. 
When  it  came  my  turn  I  was  probably  eleven 


MY    BOYHOOD  21 

or  twelve  years  old  and  the  coming  event 
loomed  big  on  my  horizon.  I  was  actually 
to  see  my  first  steamboat,  the  Hudson  River, 
and  maybe  the  steam  cars.  For  several 
days  in  advance  I  hunted  the  woods  for 
game  to  stock  the  provision  box  so  as  to 
keep  down  the  expense.  I  killed  my  first 
partridge  and  probably  a  wild  pigeon  or 
two  and  gray  squirrels.  Perched  high  on 
that  springboard  beside  Father,  my  feet 
hardly  touching  the  tops  of  the  firkins, 
at  the  rate  of  about  two  miles  an  hour  over 
rough  roads  in  chilly  November  weather, 
1  made  my  first  considerable  journey  into 
the  world.  I  crossed  the  Catskill  Moun 
tains  and  got  that  surprising  panoramic 
view  of  the  land  beyond  from  the  top. 
At  Cairo,  where  it  seems  we  passed  the 
second  night,  I  disgraced  myself  in  the 
morning,  when  Father,  after  praising  me 
to  some  bystanders,  told  me  to  get  up  in 
the  wagon  and  drive  the  load  out  in  the  road. 
In  my  earnest  effort  to  do  so  I  ran  foul  of 
one  side  of  the  big  door,  and  came  near 


22  MYBOYHOOD 

smashing  things.  Father  was  humiliated 
and  I  was  dreadfully  mortified. 

With  the  wonders  of  Catskill  I  was  duly 
impressed,  but  one  of  my  most  vivid  remem 
brances  is  a  passage  at  arms  (verbal)  at 
the  steamboat  between  Father  and  old 
Dowie.  The  latter  had  questioned  the  cor 
rectness  of  the  weight  of  the  empty  firkin 
which  was  to  be  deducted  as  tare  from  the 
total  weight.  Hot  words  followed.  Father 
said,  "Strip  it,  strip  it."  Dowie  said,  "I 
will/'  and  in  a  moment  there  stood  on  the 
scales  the  naked  firkin  of  butter,  sweating 
drops  of  salt  water.  Which  won,  I  do  not 
know.  I  remember  only  that  peace  soon 
reigned  and  Dowie  continued  to  buy  our 
butter. 

One  other  incident  of  that  trip  still  sticks 
in  my  mind.  I  was  walking  along  a  street 
just  at  dusk,  when  I  saw  a  drove  of  cattle 
coming.  The  drover,  seeing  me,  called  out, 
"  Here,  boy,  turn  those  cows  up  that  street ! " 
This  was  in  my  line,  I  was  at  home  with 
cows,  and  I  turned  the  drove  up  in  fine  style. 


MYBOYHOOD  23 

As  the  man  came  along  he  said,  "Well  done," 
and  placed  six  big  copper  cents  in  my  hand. 
Never  was  my  palm  more  unexpectedly  and 
more  agreeably  tickled.  The  feel  of  it  is 
with  me  yet ! 

At  an  earlier  date  than  that  of  the  acci 
dent  in  the  old  stone  school  house,  my  head, 
and  my  body,  too,  got  some  severe  bruises. 
One  summer  day  when  I  could  not  have  been 
more  than  three  years  old,  my  sister  Jane 
and  I  were  playing  in  the  big  attic  chamber 
and  amusing  ourselves  by  lying  across  the 
vinegar  keg  and  pushing  it  about  the  room 
with  our  feet.  We  came  to  the  top  of  the 
steep  stairway  that  ended  against  the  cham 
ber  door,  a  foot  or  more  above  the  kitchen 
floor,  and  I  suppose  we  thought  it  would  be 
fun  to  take  the  stairway  on  the  keg.  At  the 
brink  of  that  stairway  my  memory  becomes 
a  blank  and  when  I  find  myself  again  I  am 
lying  on  the  bed  in  the  "back-bedroom"  and 
the  smell  of  camphor  is  rank  in  the  room. 
How  it  fared  with  Jane  I  do  not  recall;  the 
injury  was  probably  not  serious  with  either 


24  MY    BOYHOOD 

of  us,  but  it  is  easy  to  imagine  how  poor 
Mother  must  have  been  startled  when  she 
heard  that  racket  on  the  stairs  and  the  cham 
ber  door  suddenly  burst  open,  spilling  two 
of  her  children,  mixed  up  with  the  vinegar 
keg,  out  on  the  kitchen  floor.  Jane  was 
more  than  two  years  my  senior,  and  should 
have  known  better. 

Vivid  incidents  make  a  lasting  impression. 
I  recall  what  might  have  been  a  very  serious 
accident  had  not  my  usual  good  luck  at 
tended  me,  when  I  was  a  few  years  older. 
One  autumn  day  I  was  with  my  older  broth 
ers  in  the  corn  lot,  where  they  had  gone 
with  the  lumber  wagon  to  gather  pumpkins. 
When  they  had  got  their  load  and  were 
ready  to  start  I  planted  myself  on  the  load 
above  the  hind  axle  and  let  my  legs  hang 
down  between  the  spokes  of  the  big  wheel. 
Luckily  one  of  my  brothers  saw  my  perilous 
position  just  as  the  team  was  about  to  move 
and  rescued  me  in  time.  Doubtless  my  legs 
would  have  been  broken  and  maybe  very 
badly  crushed  in  a  moment  more.  But 


•fi1 


^ 


MYBOYHOOD  25 

such  good  fortune  scorns  to  have  followed 
me  always.  One  winter's  morning,  as  I 
stooped  to  put  on  one  of  my  boots  beside 
the  kitchen  stove  at  the  house  of  a  school 
mate  with  whom  I  had  passed  the  night, 
my  face  came  in  close  contact  with  the 
spout  of  the  boiling  tea  kettle.  The  scalding 
steam  barely  missed  my  eye  and  blistered 
my  brow  a  finger's  breadth  above  it.  With 
one  eye  gone,  I  fancy  life  would  have  looked 
quite  different.  Another  time  I  was  walk 
ing  along  one  of  the  market  streets  of  New 
York,  when  a  heavy  bale  of  hay,  through 
the  carelessness  of  some  workman,  dropped 
from  thirty  or  forty  feet  above  me  and 
struck  the  pavement  at  my  feet.  I  heard 
angry  words  over  the  mishap,  spoken  by 
someone  above  me,  but  I  only  said  to  my 
self,  "Lucky  again!"  I  recall  a  bit  of  luck 
of  a  different  kind  when  I  was  a  treasury 
clerk  in  Washington.  I  had  started  for 
the  seashore  for  a  week's  vacation  with  a 
small  roll  of  new  greenbacks  in  my  pocket. 
Shortly  after  the  train  had  left  the  station 


26  MY    BOYHOOD 

I  left  my  seat  and  walked  through  two  or 
three  of  the  forward  cars  looking  for  a  friend 
who  had  agreed  to  join  me.  Not  finding 
him,  I  retraced  my  steps,  and  as  I  was 
passing  along  through  the  car  next  my  own 
I  chanced  to  see  a  roll  of  new  bills  on  the 
floor  near  the  end  of  a  seat.  Instinctively 
feeling  for  my  own  roll  of  bills  and  finding 
it  missing,  I  picked  sip  the  money  and  saw 
at  a  glance  that  it  was  mine.  The  passen 
gers  near  by  eyed  me  in  surprise,  and  I  sus 
pect  began  to  feel  in  their  own  pockets,  but 
I  did  not  stop  to  explain  and  went  to  my 
seat  startled  but  happy.  I  had  missed  my 
friend  but  I  might  have  missed  something 
of  more  value  to  me  just  at  that  time. 

A  kind  of  untoward  fate  seems  inherent 
in  the  characters  of  some  persons  and  makes 
them  the  victims  of  all  the  ill  luck  on  the 
road.  Such  a  fate  has  not  been  mine.  I  have 
met  all  the  good  luck  on  the  road.  Some 
kindly  influence  has  sent  my  best  friends 
my  way,  or  sent  me  their  way.  The  best 
thing  about  me  is  that  I  have  found  a  peren- 


MY     BOYHOOD  2J 

nial  interest  in  the  common  universal  things 
which  all  may  have  on  equal  terms,  and 
hence  have  found  plenty  to  occupy  and  ab 
sorb  me  wherever  I  have  been.  If  the  earth 
and  the  sky  are  enough  for  one,  why  should 
one  sigh  for  other  spheres? 

The  old  farm  must  have  had  at  least  ten 
miles  of  stone  walls  upon  it,  many  of  them 
built  new  by  Father  from  stones  picked  up  in 
the  fields,  and  many  of  them  relaid  by  him, 
or  rather  by  his  boys  and  hired  men. 
Father  was  wot  skilful  at  any  sort  of  craft 
work.  He  was  a  good  ploughman,  a  good 
mower  and  cradler,  excellent  with  a  team 
of  oxen  drawing  rocks,  and  good  at  most 
general  farm  work,  but  not  an  adept  at 
constructing  anything.  Hiram  was  the  me 
chanical  genius  of  the  family.  He  was  a 
good  wall-layer,  and  skilful  with  edged 
tools.  It  fell  to  his  lot  to  make  the  sleds, 
the  stone-boats,  the  hay-rigging,  the  ax 
helves,  the  flails,  to  mend  the  cradles  and 
rakes,  to  build  the  haystacks,  and  once,  I 


28  MYBOYHOOD 

remember,  he  rebuilt  the  churning  machine. 
He  was  slow  but  he  hewed  exactly  to  the 
line.  Before  and  during  my  time  on  the 
farm  Father  used  to  count  on  building  forty 
or  fifty  rods  of  stone  wall  each  year,  usually 
in  the  spring  and  early  summer.  These 
were  the  only  lines  of  poetry  and  prose 
Father  wrote.  They  are  still  very  legible 
on  the  face  of  the  landscape  and  cannot  be 
easily  erased  from  it.  Gathered  out  of  the 
confusion  of  nature,  built  up  of  fragments 
of  the  old  Devonian  rock  and  shale,  laid 
with  due  regard  to  the  wear  and  tear  of  time, 
well-bottomed  and  well-capped,  establishing 
boundaries  and  defining  possessions,  etc., 
these  lines  of  stone  wall  afford  a  good  lesson 
in  many  things  besides  wall  building.  They 
are  good  literature  and  good  philosophy. 
They  smack  of  the  soil,  they  have  local 
colour,  they  are  a  bit  of  chaos  brought  into 
order.  When  you  deal  with  nature  only 
the  square  deal  is  worth  while.  How  she 
searches  for  the  vulnerable  points  in  your 
structure,  the  weak  places  in  your  founda- 


MYBOYHOOD  2Q 

tion,  the  defective  material  in  your  build 
ing! 

The  farmer's  stone  wall,  when  well  built, 
stands  about  as  long  as  he  does.  It  begins 
to  reel  and  look  decrepit  when  he  begins  to 
do  so.  But  it  can  be  relaid  and  he  cannot. 
One  day  I  passed  by  the  roadside  to  speak 
with  an  old  man  who  was  rebuilding  a  wall. 
''I  laid  this  wall  fifty  years  ago/'  he  said. 
"When  it  is  laid  up  again  I  shall  not  have 
the  job/'  He  had  stood  up  longer  than  had 
his  wall. 

A  stone  wall  is  the  friend  of  all  the  wild 
creatures.  It  is  a  safe  line  of  communica 
tion  with  all  parts  of  the  landscape.  What 
do  the  chipmunks,  red  squirrels,  and  weasels 
do  in  a  country  without  stone  fences?  The 
woodchucks  and  the  coons  and  foxes  also  use 
them. 

It  was  my  duty  as  a  farm  boy  to  help 
pick  up  the  stone  and  pry  up  the  rocks.  I 
could  put  the  bait  under  the  lever,  even  if 
my  weight  on  top  of  it  did  not  count  for 
much.  The  slow,  patient,  hulky  oxen,  how 


3<3  MYBOYHOOD 

they  would  kink  their  tails,  hump  theii 
backs,  and  throw  their  weight  into  the  bows 
when  they  felt  a  heavy  rock  behind  them  and 
Father  lifted  up  his  voice  and  laid  on  the 
"gad"!  It  was  a  good  subject  for  a  picture 
which,  I  think,  no  artist  has  ever  painted. 
How  many  rocks  we  turned  out  of  their 
beds,  where  they  had  slept  since  the  great 
ice  sheet  tucked  them  up  there,  maybe  a 
hundred  thousand  years  ago — how  wounded 
and  torn  the  meadow  or  pasture  looked, 
bleeding  as  it  were,  in  a  score  of  places, 
when  the  job  was  finished !  But  the  further 
surgery  of  the  plough  and  harrow,  followed 
by  the  healing  touch  of  the  seasons,  soon 
made  all  whole  again. 

The  work  on  the  farm  in  those  days  varied 
little  from  year  to  year.  In  winter  the  care 
of  the  cattle,  the  cutting  of  the  wood,  and 
the  thrashing  of  the  oats  and  rye  filled  the 
time.  From  the  age  of  ten  or  twelve  till 
we  were  grown  up,  we  went  to  school  only 
in  winter,  doing  the  chores  morning  and 
evening,  and  engaging  in  general  work 


MY    BOYHOOD  31 

every  other  Saturday,  which  was  a  holiday. 
Often  my  older  brothers  would  have  to 
leave  school  by  three  o'clock  to  get  home  to 
put  up  the  cows  in  my  father's  absence. 
Those  school  days,  how  they  come  back  to 
me! — the  long  walk  across  lots,  through  the 
snow-choked  fields  and  woods,  our  narrow 
path  so  often  obliterated  by  a  fresh  fall  of 
snow;  the  cutting  winds,  the  bitter  cold,  the 
snow  squeaking  beneath  our  frozen  cowhide 
boots,  our  trousers'  legs  often  tied  down 
with  tow  strings  to  keep  the  snow  from  push 
ing  them  up  above  our  boot  tops;  the  wide- 
open  white  landscape  with  its  faint  black 
lines  of  stone  wall  when  we  had  passed  the 
woods  and  began  to  dip  down  into  West 
Settlement  valley;  the  Smith  boys  and 
Bouton  boys  and  Dart  boys,  afar  off,  thread 
ing  the  fields  on  their  way  to  school,  their 
forms  etched  on  the  white  hillsides,  one  of 
the  bigger  boys,  Ria  Bouton,  who  had  many 
chores  to  do,  morning  after  morning  running 
the  whole  distance  so  as  not  to  be  late;  the 
red  school  house  in  the  distance  by  the  road- 


32  MY    BOYHOOD 

side  with  the  dark  spot  in  its  centre  made  by 
the  open  door  of  the  entry  way;  the  creek 
in  the  valley,  often  choked  with  anchor  ice, 
which  our  path  crossed  and  into  which  I  one 
morning  slumped,  reaching  the  school  house 
with  my  clothes  freezing  upon  me  and  the 
water  gurgling  in  my  boots;  the  boys  and 
girls  there,  Jay  Gould  among  them,  two 
thirds  of  them  now  dead  and  the  living  scat 
tered  from  the  Hudson  to  the  Pacific;  the 
teachers  nowall  dead;  the  studies,  the  games, 
the  wrestlings,  the  baseball — all  these  things 
and  more  pass  before  me  as  I  recall  those 
long-gone  days.  Two  years  ago  I  hunted 
up  one  of  those  schoolmates  in  California 
whom  I  had  not  seen  for  over  sixty  years. 
She  was  my  senior  by  seven  or  eight  years, 
and  I  had  a  boy's  remembrance  of  her  fresh 
sweet  face,  her  kindly  eyes  and  gentle  man 
ners.  I  was  greeted  by  a  woman  of  eighty- 
two,  with  dimmed  sight  and  dulled  hearing, 
but  instantly  I  recognized  some  vestiges  of 
the  charm  and  sweetness  of  my  elder  school 
mate  of  so  long  ago.  No  cloud  was  on  her 


MY    BOY  HOOD  33 

mind  or  memory  and  for  an  hour  we  again 
lived  among  the  old  people  and  scenes. 

What  a  roomful  of  pupils,  many  of  them 
young  men  and  women,  there  was  during 
those  winters,  thirty-five  or  forty  each  day! 
In  late  years  there  are  never  more  than 
five  or  six.  The  fountains  of  population  are 
drying  up  more  rapidly  than  are  our  streams. 
Of  that  generous  roomful  of  young  people, 
many  became  farmers,  a  few  became  busi 
ness  men,  three  or  four  became  professional 
men,  and  only  one,  so  far  as  1  know,  took 
to  letters;  and  he,  judged  by  his  environ 
ment  and  antecedents,  the  last  one  you 
would  have  picked  out  for  such  a  career. 
You  might  have  seen  in  Jay  Gould's  Jewish 
look,  bright  scholarship,  and  pride  of  man 
ners  some  promise  of  an  unusual  career; 
but  in  the  boy  of  his  own  age  whom  he  was 
so  fond  of  wrestling  with  and  of  having  go 
home  with  him  at  night,  but  whose  visits  he 
would  never  return,  what  was  there  indica 
tive  of  the  future?  Surely  not  much  that  I 
can  now  discover.  Jay  Gould,  who  became 


34  MYBOYHOOD 

a  sort  of  Napoleon  of  finance,  early  showed 
a  talent  for  big  business  and  power  to  deal 
with  men.  He  had  many  characteristic 
traits  which  came  out  even  in  his  walk. 
One  day  in  New  York,  after  more  than 
twenty  years  since  I  had  known  him  as  a 
boy,  I  was  walking  up  Fifth  Avenue,  when  I 
saw  a  man  on  the  other  side  of  the  street, 
more  than  a  block  away,  coming  toward  me, 
whose  gait  arrested  my  attention  as  some 
thing  I  had  known  long  before.  Who  could 
it  be?  I  thought,  and  began  to  ransack  my 
memory  for  a  clew.  I  had  seen  that  gait 
before.  As  the  man  came  opposite  me  I 
saw  he  was  Jay  Gould.  That  walk  in  some 
subtle  way  differed  from  the  walk  of  any 
other  man  I  had  known.  It  is  a  curious 
psychological  fact  that  the  two  men  outside 
my  own  family  of  whom  I  have  oftenest 
dreamed  in  my  sleep  are  Emerson  and  Jay 
Gould;  one  to  whom  I  owe  so  much,  the 
other  to  whom  I  owe  nothing;  one  whose 
name  I  revere,  the  other  whose  name  I  asso 
ciate,  as  does  the  world,  with  the  dark  way 


MYBOYHOOD  35 

of  speculative  finance.  The  new  expounders 
of  the  philosophy  of  dreams  would  probably 
tell  me  that  I  had  a  secret  admiration  for 
Jay  Gould.  If  I  have,  it  slumbers  deeply 
in  my  sub-conscious  self  and  awakens  only 
when  my  conscious  self  sleeps. 

But  I  set  out  to  talk  of  the  work  on  the 
farm.  The  threshing  was  mostly  done  in 
winter  with  the  hickory  flail,  one  shock  of 
fifteen  sheaves  making  a  flooring.  On  the 
dry  cold  days  the  grain  shelled  easily.  After 
a  flooring  had  been  thrashed  over  at  least 
three  times,  the  straw  was  bound  up  again 
in  sheaves,  the  floor  completely  raked  over 
and  the  grain  banked  up  against  the  side 
of  the  bay.  When  the  pile  became  so  large 
it  was  in  the  way,  it  was  cleaned  up,  that  is, 
run  through  the  fanning  mill,  one  of  us 
shovelling  in  the  grain,  another  turning  the 
mill,  and  a  third  measuring  the  grain  and 
putting  it  into  bags,  or  into  the  bins  of  the 
granary.  One  winter  when  I  was  a  small 
boy  Jonathan  Scudder  threshed  for  us  in 
the  barn  on  the  hill.  He  was  in  love  with 


36  MYBOYHOOD 

my  sister  Oily  Ann  and  wanted  to  make  a 
good  impression  on  the  "old  folks."  Every 
night  at  supper  Father  would  say  to  him, 
"Well,  Jonathan,  how  many  shock  to-day?" 
and  they  grew  more  and  more,  until  one  day 
he  reached  the  limit  of  fourteen  and  he  was 
highly  complimented  on  his  day's  work. 
It  made  an  impression  on  Father,  but  it  did 
not  soften  the  heart  of  Oily  Ann.  The  sound 
of  the  flail  and  the  fanning  mill  is  heard  in 
the  farmers'  barns  no  more.  The  power 
threshing  machine  that  travels  from  farm 
to  farm  now  does  the  job  in  a  single  day — a 
few  hours  of  pandemonium,  with  now  and 
then  a  hand  or  an  arm  crushed  in  place  of 
the  days  of  leisurely  swinging  of  the  hickory 
flail. 

The  first  considerable  work  in  spring  was 
sugar-making,  always  a  happy  time  for  me. 
Usually  the  last  half  of  March,  when  rills 
from  the  melting  snow  began  to  come 
through  the  fields,  the  veins  of  the  sugar 
maples  began  to  thrill  with  the  spring 
warmth.  There  was  a  general  awakening 


MY     BOYHOOD  37 

about  the  farm  at  this  time:  the  cackling  of 
the  hens,  the  bleating  of  young  lambs  and 
calves,  and  the  wistful  lowing  of  the  cows. 
Earlier  in  the  month  the  "sap  spiles"  had 
been  overhauled,  resharpened,  and  new  ones 
made,  usually  from  bass  wood.  In  my  time 
the  sap  gouge  was  used  instead  of  the  auger 
and  the  manner  of  tapping  was  crude  and 
wasteful.  A  slanting  gash  three  or  four 
inches  long  and  a  half  inch  or  more  deep  was 
cut,  and  an  inch  below  the  lower  end  of  this 
the  gouge  was  driven  in  to  make  the  place 
for  the  spile,  a  piece  of  wood  two  inches 
wide,  shaped  to  the  gouge,  and  a  foot  or 
more  in  length.  It  gave  the  tree  a  double 
and  unnecessary  wound.  The  bigger  the 
gash  the  more  the  sap,  seemed  to  be  the 
theory,  as  if  the  tree  was  a  barrel  filled  with 
liquid,  whereas  a  small  wound  made  by  a 
half-inch  bit  does  the  work  just  as  well  and 
is  far  less  injurious  to  the  tree. 

When  there  came  a  bright  morning,  wind 
northwest  and  warm  enough  to  begin  to 
thaw  by  eight  o'clock,  the  sugar-making 


38  MYBOYHOOD 

utensils — pans,  kettles,  spiles,  hogsheads- 
were  loaded  upon  the  sled  and  taken  to  the 
woods,  and  by  ten  o'clock  the  trees  began  to 
feel  the  cruel  ax  and  gouge  once  more.  It 
usually  fell  to  my  part  to  carry  the  pans 
and  spiles  for  one  of  the  tappers,  Hiram  or 
Father,  and  to  arrange  the  pans  on  a  level 
foundation  of  sticks  or  stones,  in  position. 
Father  often  used  to  haggle  the  tree  a  good 
deal  in  tapping.  "By  Fagus,"  he  would 
say,  "how  awkward  I  am!"  The  rapid 
tinkle  of  those  first  drops  of  sap  in  the  tin 
pan,  how  well  I  remember  it !  Probably  the 
note  of  the  first  song  sparrow  or  first  blue 
bird,  or  the  spring  call  of  the  nuthatch, 
sounded  in  unison.  Usually  only  patches 
of  snow  lingered  here  and  there  in  the  woods 
and  the  earth-stained  remnants  of  old  drifts 
on  the  sides  of  the  hills  and  along  the  stone 
walls.  Those  lucid  warm  March  days  in 
the  naked  maple  woods  under  the  blue  sky, 
with  the  first  drops  of  sap  ringing  in  the 
pans,  had  a  charm  that  does  not  fade  from 
my  mind.  After  the  trees  were  all  tapped, 


MYBOYHOOD  39 

two  hundred  and  fifty  of  them,  the  big  ket 
tles  were  again  set  up  in  the  old  stone  arch, 
and  the  hogsheads  in  which  to  store  the  sap 
placed  in  position.  By  four  o'clock  many  of 
the  pans — milk  pans  from  the  dairy — would 
be  full,  and  the  gathering  with  neck  yoke  and 
pails  began.  When  I  was  fourteen  or  fifteen 
I  took  a  hand  in  this  part  of  the  work.  It 
used  to  tax  my  strength  to  carry  the  two 
twelve-quart  pails  full  through  the  rough 
places  and  up  the  steep  banks  in  the  woods 
and  then  lift  them  up  and  alternately  empty 
them  into  the  hogsheads  without  displacing 
the  neck  yoke.  But  I  could  do  it.  Now  all 
this  work  is  done  by  the  aid  of  a  team  and 
a  pipe  fastened  on  a  sled.  Before  I  was  old 
enough  to  gather  sap  it  fell  to  me  to  go  to 
the  barns  and  put  in  hay  for  the  cows  and 
help  stable  them.  The  next  morning  the 
boiling  of  the  sap  would  begin,  with  Hiram 
in  charge.  The  big  deep  iron  kettles  were 
slow  evaporators  compared  with  the  broad 
shallow  sheet-iron  pans  now  in  use.  Pro 
fundity  cannot  keep  up  with  shallowness  in 


4O  MYBOYHOOD 

sugar-making,  the  more  superficial  your 
evaporator,  within  limits,  the  more  rapid 
your  progress.  It  took  the  farmers  nearly 
a  hundred  years  to  find  this  out,  or  at  least 
to  act  upon  it. 

At  the  end  of  a  couple  of  days  of  hard 
boiling  Hiram  would  ''syrup  off,"  having 
reduced  two  hundred  pails  of  sap  to  five  or 
six  of  syrup.  The  syruping-off  often  oc 
curred  after  dark.  When  the  liquid  dropped 
from  a  dipper  which  was  dipped  into  it  and, 
held  up  in  the  cool  air,  formed  into  stiff  thin 
masses,  it  had  reached  the  stage  of  syrup. 
How  we  minded  our  steps  over  the  rough 
path,  in  the  semi-darkness  of  the  old  tin 
lantern,  in  carrying  those  precious  pails  of 
syrup  to  the  house,  where  the  final  process  of 
"sugaring  off"  was  to  be  completed  by 
Mother  and  Jane! 

The  sap  runs  came  at  intervals  of  several 
days.  Two  or  three  days  would  usually 
end  one  run.  A  change  in  the  weather  to 
below  freezing  would  stop  the  flow,  and  a 
change  to  much  warmer  would  check  it. 


MYBOYHOOD  4! 

The  fountains  of  sap  are  let  loose  by  frosty 
sunshine.  Frost  in  the  ground,  or  on  it  in 
the  shape  of  snow  and  the  air  full  of  sunshine 
are  the  most  favourable  conditions.  A 
certain  chill  and  crispness,  something  crys 
talline,  in  the  air  are  necessary.  A  touch  of 
enervating  warmth  from  the  south  or  a 
frigidity  from  the  north  and  the  trees  feel  it 
through  their  thick  bark  coats  very  quickly. 
Between  the  temperatures  of  thirty-five  to 
fifty  degrees  they  get  in  their  best  work. 
After  we  have  had  one  run  ending  in  rain 
and  warmth,  a  fresh  fall  of  snow — "sap 
snow",  the  farmers  call  such — will  give  us 
another  run.  Three  or  four  good  runs  make 
a  long  and  successful  season.  My  boyhood 
days  in  the  spring  sugar  bush  were  my  most 
enjoyable  on  the  farm.  How  I  came  to 
know  each  one  of  those  two  hundred  and 
fifty  trees — what  a  distinct  sense  of  individ 
uality  seemed  to  adhere  to  most  of  them, 
as  much  so  as  to  each  cow  in  a  dairy!  I 
knew  at  which  trees  I  would  be  pretty  sure 
to  find  a  full  pan  and  at  which  ones  a  less 


42  MYBOYHOOD 

amount.  One  huge  tree  always  gave  a 
cream-pan  full — a  double  measure — while 
the  others  were  filling  an  ordinary  pan. 
This  was  known  as  "the  old  cream-pan 
tree/'  Its  place  has  long  been  vacant; 
about  half  the  others  are  still  standing,  but 
with  the  decrepitude  of  age  appearing  in 
their  tops,  a  new  generation  of  maples  has 
taken  the  place  of  the  vanished  veterans. 

While  tending  the  kettles  there  beside 
the  old  arch  in  the  bright,  warm  March  or 
April  days,  with  my  brother,  or  while  he  had 
gone  to  dinner,  looking  down  the  long  valley 
and  off  over  the  curving  backs  of  the  distant 
mountain  ranges,  what  dreams  I  used  to 
have,  what  vague  longings,  and,  I  may  say, 
what  happy  anticipations!  I  am  sure  I 
gathered  more  than  sap  and  sugar  in  those 
youthful  days  amid  the  maples.  When  1 
visit  the  old  home  now  I  have  to  walk  up 
to  the  sugar  bush  and  stand  around  the  old 
"boiling  place/'  trying  to  transport  myself 
back  into  the  magic  atmosphere  of  that  boy 
hood  time.  The  man  has  his  dreams,  too, 


MY     BOYHOOD  43 

but  to  his  eyes  the  world  is  not  steeped  in 
romance  as  it  is  to  the  eyes  of  youth. 

One  springtime  in  the  sugar  season  my 
cousin,  Gib  Kelly,  a  boy  of  my  own  age, 
visited  me,  staying  two  or  three  days.  (He 
died  last  fall.)  When  he  went  away  I  was 
minding  the  kettles  in  the  woods,  and  as  I 
saw  him  crossing  the  bare  fields  in  the 
March  sunshine,  his  steps  bent  toward  the 
distant  mountains,  I  still  remember  what  a 
sense  of  loss  came  over  me,  his  comradeship 
had  so  brightened  my  enjoyment  of  the 
beautiful  days.  He  seemed  to  take  my 
whole  world  with  him,  and  on  that  and  the 
following  day  I  went  about  my  duties  in 
the  sap  bush  in  a  wistful  and  pensive  mood 
I  had  never  before  felt.  I  early  showed  the 
capacity  for  comradeship.  A  boy  friend 
could  throw  the  witchery  of  romance  over 
everything.  Oh,  the  enchanted  days  with 
my  youthful  mates!  And  I  have  not  en 
tirely  outgrown  that  early  susceptibility. 
There  are  persons  in  the  world  whose  com 
radeship  can  still  transmute  the  baser  metal 


44  MYBOYHOOD 

of  commonplace  scenes  and  experiences  into 
the  purest  gold  of  romance  for  me.  It  is 
probably  my  feminine  idiosyncrasies  that 
explain  all  this.  Another  unforgettable  pas 
sion  of  comradeship  in  my  youth  I  experi 
enced  toward  the  son  of  a  cousin,  a  boy  four 
or  five  years  old,  or  about  half  my  own  age. 
One  spring  his  mother  and  he  were  visiting 
at  our  house  eight  or  ten  days.  The  child 
was  very  winsome  and  we  soon  became  in 
separable  companions.  He  was  like  a  visitor 
from  another  sphere.  I  frequently  carried 
him  on  my  back,  and  my  heart  opened  to 
him  more  and  more  each  day.  One  day  we 
started  to  come  down  a  rather  steep  pair  of 
stairs  from  the  hog-pen  chamber;  I  had 
stepped  down  a  few  steps  and  reached  out 
to  take  little  Harry  in  my  arms,  as  he  stood 
on  the  floor  at  the  head  of  the  stairs,  and 
carry  him  down,  when  in  his  joy  he  gave  a 
spring  and  toppled  me  over  with  him  in  my 
arms,  and  we  brought  up  at  the  bottom  with 
our  heads  against  some  solid  timbers.  It 
was  a  severe  shake-up  but  hurt  my  heart 


MY    BOYHOOD  4$ 

more  than  it  did  my  head  because  the  boy 
was  badly  bruised.  The  event  comes  back 
to  me  as  if  it  were  but  yesterday.  For 
weeks  after  his  departure  I  longed  for  him 
day  and  night  and  the  experience  still  shines 
like  a  star  in  my  boyhood  life.  I  never  saw 
him  again  until  two  years  ago  when,  know 
ing  he  lived  there,  a  practising  physician,  I 
hunted  him  up  in  San  Francisco.  I  found 
him  a  sedate  gray-haired  man,  with  no  hint, 
of  course,  of  the  child  I  had  known  and 
loved  more  than  sixty  years  before.  It  has 
been  my  experience  on  several  occasions  to 
hunt  up  friends  of  my  youth  after  the  lapse 
of  more  than  half  a  century.  Last  spring 
I  had  a  letter  from  a  pupil  of  mine  in  the 
first  school  I  ever  taught,  in  1854  or  '55.. 
I  had  not  seen  or  heard  from  him  in  all  those 
years  when  he  recalled  himself  to  my  mind. 
The  name  I  had  not  forgotten,  Roswell 
Beach,  but  the  face  I  had.  Only  two  weeks 
ago,  being  near  his  town,  it  occurred  to  me 
to  look  him  up.  I  did  so  and  was  shocked 
to  find  him  on  his  deathbed.  Too  weak  to 


4&  MYBOYHOOD 

raise  his  head  from  his  pillow  he  yet  threw 
his  arms  around  me  and  spoke  my  name 
many  times  with  marked  affection.  He 
died  a  few  days  later.  I  was  to  him  what 
some  of  my  old  teachers  were  to  me — stars 
that  never  set  below  my  horizon. 

My  boyish  liking  for  girls  was  quite  dif 
ferent  from  my  liking  for  boys — there  was 
little  or  no  sense  of  comradeship  in  it. 
When  I  was  eight  or  nine  years  old  there 
was  one  girl  in  the  school  toward  whom  I 
felt  very  partial,  and  I  thought  she  recipro 
cated  till  one  day  I  suddenly  saw  how  little 
she  cared  for  me.  The  teacher  had  for 
bidden  us  to  put  our  feet  upon  the  seats  in 
front  of  us.  In  a  spirit  of  rebellion,  I  sup 
pose,  when  the  teacher  was  not  looking,  I 
put  my  brown,  soil-stained  bare  feet  upon 
the  forbidden  seat.  Polly  quickly  spoke 
up  and  said,  "Teacher,  Johnny  Burris 
put  his  feet  on  the  seat" — what  a  blow  it 
was  to  me  for  her  to  tell  on  me !  Like  a  cruel 
frost  those  words  nipped  the  tender  buds 
of  my  affection  and  they  never  sprouted 


MYBOYHOOD  47 

again.  Years  after,  her  younger  brother 
married  my  younger  sister,  and  maybe  that 
unkind  cut  of  our  school  days  kept  me 
from  marrying  Polly.  I  had  other  puppy 
loves  but  they  all  died  a  natural  death. 

But  let  me  get  back  to  the  farm  work. 

The  gathering  of  the  things  in  the  sugar 
bush,  when  the  flow  of  sap  had  stopped, 
usually  fell  to  Eden  and  me.  We  would 
carry  the  pans  and  spiles  together  in  big 
piles,  where  the  oxen  and  sled  could  reach 
them.  Then  when  they  were  taken  to  the 
house  it  was  my  mother's  and  sister's  task 
to  get  them  ready  for  the  milk. 

The  drawing  out  of  the  manure  and  the 
spring  ploughing  was  the  next  thing  in  order 
on  the  farm.  I  took  a  hand  in  the  former 
but  not  in  the  latter.  The  spreading  of 
the  manure  that  had  been  drawn  out  and 
placed  in  heaps  in  the  fields  during  the 
winter  often  fell  to  me.  I  remember  that 
1  did  not  bend  my  back  to  the  work  very 
willingly,  especially  when  the  cattle  had 
been  bedded  with  long  rye  straw,  but 


48  MYBOYHOOD 

there  were  compensations.  I  could  lean 
on  my  fork  handle  and  gaze  at  the 
spring  landscape,  I  could  see  the  budding 
trees  and  listen  to  the  songs  of  the  early 
birds  and  maybe  catch  the  note  of  the  first 
swallow  in  the  air  overhead.  The  farm 
boy  always  has  the  whole  of  nature  at  his 
elbow  and  he  is  usually  aware  of  it. 

When,  armed  with  my  long-handled 
"knocker,"  I  used  to  be  sent  forth  in  the 
April  meadows  to  beat  up  and  scatter  the 
fall  droppings  of  the  cows — the  Juno's 
cushions  as  Irving  named  them — I  was  in 
much  more  congenial  employment.  Had  I 
known  the  game  of  golf  in  those  days 
I  should  probably  have  looked  upon  this 
as  a  fair  substitute.  To  stand  the  big 
cushions  up  on  edge  and  with  a  real  golfer's 
swing  hit  them  with  my  mallet  and  see  the 
pieces  fly  was  more  like  play  than  work. 
Oh,  then  it  was  April  and  I  felt  the  rising 
tide  of  spring  in  my  blood,  and  a  bit  of 
free  activity  like  this  under  the  blue  sky 
suited  my  humour.  A  boy  likes  almost  any 


MYBOYHOOD  49 

work  that  affords  him  an  escape  from  rou 
tine  and  humdrum  and  has  an  element  of 
play  in  it.  Turning  the  grindstone  or  the 
fanning  mill  or  carrying  together  sheaves  or 
picking  up  potatoes  or  carrying  in  wood 
were  duties  that  were  a  drag  upon  my  spirits. 

The  spring  ploughing  and  the  sowing  of 
the  grain  and  harrowing  fell  mainly  to 
Father  and  my  older  brothers.  The  spring 
work  was  considered  done  when  the  oats 
were  sowed  and  the  corn  and  potatoes 
planted:  the  first  in  early  May,  the  latter  in 
late  May.  The  buckwheat  was  not  sown 
until  late  June.  One  farmer  would  ask 
another,  "How  many  oats  are  you  going 
to  sow,  or  have  you  sown?"  not  how  many 
acres.  "Oh,  fifteen  or  twenty  bushels/' 
would  be  the  answer. 

The  working  of  the  roads  came  in  June 
after  the  crops  were  in.  All  hands,  sum 
moned  by  the  "path  master,"  would  meet 
at  a  given  date,  at  the  end  of  the  district 
down  by  the  old  stone  school  house — men 
and  boys  with  oxen,  horses,  scrapers,  hoes, 


5O  M  Y     B  O  Y  H  O  O  D 

crowbars — and  begin  repairing  the  highway. 
It  was  not  strenuous  work,  but  a  kind  of 
holiday  that  we  all  enjoyed  more  or  less. 
The  road  got  fixed  after  a  fashion,  here  and 
there — a  bridge  mended,  a  ditch  cleaned 
out,  the  loose  stones  removed,  a  hole  filled 
up,  or  a  short  section  "turnpiked" — but 
the  days  were  eight-hour  days  and  they 
did  not  sit  heavy  upon  us.  The  state  does 
it  much  better  now  with  road  machinery 
and  a  few  men.  Once  or  twice  a  year 
Father  used  to  send  me  with  a  hoe  to  throw 
the  loose  stones  out  of  the  road. 

A  pleasanter  duty  during  those  years 
was  shooting  chipmunks  around  the  corn. 
These  little  rodents  were  so  plentiful  in 
my  youth  that  they  used  to  pull  up  the 
sprouting  corn  around  the  margin  of  the 
field  near  the  stone  walls.  Armed  with 
the  old  flint-lock  musket,  sometimes  loaded 
with  a  handful  of  hard  peas,  I  used  to 
haunt  the  edges  of  the  cornfield,  watching 
for  the  little  striped-backed  culprits.  How 
remorselessly  I  used  to  kill  them!  In 


MY     BOYHOOD  5! 

those  days  there  were  a  dozen  where  there 
is  barely  one  now.  The  woods  literally 
swarmed  with  them,  and  when  beechnuts 
and  acorns  were  scarce  they  were  compelled 
to  poach  upon  the  farmer's  crops.  It  was 
to  reduce  them  and  other  pests  that  shooting 
matches  were  held.  Two  men  would  choose 
sides  as  in  the  spelling  matches,  seven  or 
eight  or  more  were  on  a  side,  and  the  side 
that  brought  in  the  most  trophies  at  the 
end  of  the  week  won  and  the  losing  side  had 
to  pay  for  the  supper  at  the  village  hotel 
for  the  whole  crowd.  A  chipmunk's  tail 
counted  one,  a  red  squirrel's  three,  a  gray 
squirrel's  still  more.  Hawks'  heads  and 
owls'  heads  counted  as  high  as  ten,  I  think. 
Crows'  heads  also  counted  pretty  high. 
One  man  who  had  little  time  to  hunt  en 
gaged  me  to  help  him,  offering  me  so  much 
per  dozen  units.  I  remember  that  I  found 
up  in  the  sap  bush  a  brood  of  young  screech 
owls  just  out  of  the  nest  and  I  killed  them 
all.  That  man  is  still  owing  me  for  those 
owls.  What  a  lot  of  motley  heads  and 


52  MY    BOYHOOD 

tails  were  brought  in  at  the  end  of  the  week! 
I  never  saw  them  but  wish  I  had.  Re 
peated  shooting  matches  of  this  kind,  in 
different  parts  of  the  state,  so  reduced  the 
small  wild  life,  especially  the  chipmunks, 
that  it  has  not  yet  recovered,  and 
probably  never  will.  In  those  days  the 
farmer's  hand  was  against  nearly  every 
wild  thing.  We  used  to  shoot  and  trap 
crows  and  hen  hawks  and  small  hawks  as 
though  they  were  our  mortal  enemies. 
Farmers  were  wont  to  stand  up  poles  in 
their  meadows  and  set  steel  traps  on  the 
top  of  them  to  catch  the  hen  hawks  that 
came  for  the  meadow  mice  which  were 
damaging  their  meadows.  The  hen  hawk 
is  so  named  because  he  rarely  or  never 
catches  a  hen  or  a  chicken.  He  is  a  mouser. 
We  used  to  bait  the  hungry  crows  in  spring 
with  "deacon"  legs  and  shoot  them  without 
mercy,  and  all  because  they  now  and  then 
pulled  a  little  corn,  forgetting  or  not  know 
ing  of  the  grubs  and  worms  they  pulled 
and  the  grasshoppers  they  ate.  But  all 


MY     BOYHOOD  53 

this  is  changed  and  now  our  sable  friends 
and  the  high-soaring  hawks  are  seldom 
molested.  The  fool  with  a  rifle  is  very 
apt  to  shoot  an  eagle  if  the  chance  comes 
to  him,  but  he  has  to  be  very  sly  about 
it. 

The  buttercups  and  the  daisies  would  be 
blooming  when  we  were  working  the  road, 
and  the  timothy  grass  about  ready  to  do  so 
— pointing  to  the  near  approach  of  the  great 
event  of  the  season,  the  one  major  task 
toward  which  so  many  other  things  pointed 
— "haying;"  the  gathering  of  our  hundred 
or  more  tons  of  meadow  hay.  This  was 
always  a  hard-fought  campaign.  Our 
weapons  were  gotten  ready  in  due  time, 
new  scythes  and  new  snaths,  new  rakes  and 
new  forks,  the  hay  riggings  repaired  or  built 
anew,  etc.  Shortly  after  the  Fourth  of 
July  the  first  assault  upon  the  legions  of 
timothy  would  be  made  in  the  lodged  grass 
below  the  barn.  Our  scythes  would  turn 
up  great  swaths  that  nearly  covered  the 
ground  and  that  put  our  strength  to  a 


54  MYBOYHOOD 

severe  test.     When  noon  came  we  would 
go  to  the  house  with  shaking  knees. 

The  first  day  of  haying  meant  nearly  a 
whole  day  with  the  scythe,  and  was  the  most 
trying  of  all.  After  that  a  half  day  mowing, 
when  the  weather  was  good,  meant  work 
in  curing  and  hauling  each  afternoon. 
From  the  first  day  in  early  July  till  the  end 
of  August  we  lived  for  the  hayfield.  No 
respite  except  on  rainy  days  and  Sundays, 
and  no  change  except  from  one  meadow  to 
another.  No  eight-hour  days  then,  rather 
twelve  and  fourteen,  including  the  milking. 
No  horse  rakes,  no  mowing  machines  or  hay 
tedders  or  loading  or  pitching  devices  then. 
The  scythe,  the  hand  rake,  the  pitchfork 
in  the  calloused  hands  of  men  and  boys  did 
the  work,  occasionally  the  women  even 
taking  a  turn  with  the  rake  or  in  mowing 
away.  J  remember  the  first  wire-toothed 
horse  rake  with  its  two  handles,  which  when 
the  day  was  hot  and  the  grass  heavy  nearly 
killed  both  man  and  horse.  The  holder 
would  throw  his  weight  upon  it  to  make  it 


MYBOYHOOD  55 

grip  and  hold  the  hay,  and  then,  in  a  spasm 
of  energy,  lift  it  up  and  make  it  drop  the 
hay.  From  this  rude  instrument,  through 
various  types  of  wooden  and  revolving 
rakes,  the  modern  wheeled  rake,  with  which 
the  raker  rides  at  his  ease,  has  been  evolved. 
At  this  season  the  cows  were  brought  to 
the  yard  by  or  before  five,  breakfast  was  at 
six,  lunch  in  the  field  at  ten,  dinner  at  twelve, 
and  supper  at  five,  with  milking  and  hay 
drawing  and  heaping  up  till  sundown. 
Those  mid-forenoon  lunches  of  Mother's 
good  rye  bread  and  butter,  with  crullers 
or  gingerbread,  and  in  August  a  fresh 
green  cucumber  and  a  sweating  jug  of 
water  fresh  from  the  spring — sweating,  not 
as  we  did,  because  it  was  hot,  but  because 
it  was  cold,  partaken  under  an  ash  or  a 
maple  tree — how  sweet  and  fragrant  the 
memory  of  it  all  is  to  me! 

Till  I  reached  my  'teens  it  was  my  task 
to  spread  hay  and  to  rake  after;  later  I 
took  my  turn  with  the  mowers  and  pitchers. 
I  never  loaded,  hence  I  never  pitched  over 


56  MY    BOYHOOD 

the  big  beam.  How  Father  watched  the 
weather!  The  rain  that  makes  the  grass 
ruins  the  hay.  If  the  morning  did  not 
promise  a  good  hay  day  our  scythes  would 
be  ground  but  hung  back  in  their  places. 
When  a  thunderstorm  was  gathering  in 
the  west  and  much  hay  was  ready  for  haul 
ing,  how  it  quickened  our  steps  and  our 
strokes!  It  was  the  sound  of  the  guns  of 
the  approaching  foe.  In  one  hour  we  would 
do,  or  try  to  do,  the  work  of  two.  How  the 
wagon  would  rattle  over  the  road,  how  the 
men  would  mop  their  faces  and  how  I, 
while  hurrying,  would  secretly  exult  that 
now  I  would  have  an  hour  to  finish  my  cross 
bow  or  to  work  on  my  pond  in  the  pasture 
lot! 

Those  late  summer  afternoons  after  the 
shower — what  man  who  has  spent  his 
youth  on  the  farm  does  not  recall  them! 
The  high-piled  thunder  heads  of  the  re 
treating  storm  above  the  eastern  mountains, 
the  moist  fresh  smell  of  the  hay  and  the 
fields,  the  red  puddles  in  the  road,  the  robins 


John  Burroughs  and  his  grandchild  at 
Woodchuck  Lodge 


MY     BOYHOOD  57 

singing  from  the  tree  tops,  the  washed  and 
cooler  air  and  the  welcomed  feeling  of  relax 
ation  which  they  brought.  It  was  a  good 
time  now  to  weed  the  garden,  to  grind  the 
scythes,  and  do  other  odd  jobs. 

When  the  haying  was  finished,  usually 
late  in  August,  in  my  time,  there  was 
usually  a  let-up  for  a  few  days. 

I  was  the  seventh  child  in  a  family  of 
ten  children:  Hiram,  Oily  Ann,  Wilson, 
Curtis,  Edmond,  and  Jane  came  before 
me;  Eden,  Abigail,  and  Eveline  came  after 
me.  All  were  as  unlike  me  in  those  mental 
qualities  by  which  I  am  known  to  the  world 
as  you  can  well  conceive,  but  all  were  like 
me  in  their  more  fundamental  family  traits. 
We  all  had  the  same  infirmities  of  character: 
we  were  all  tenderfeet — lacking  in  grit, 
will  power,  self-assertion,  and  the  ability 
to  deal  with  men.  We  were  easily  crowded 
to  the  wall,  easily  cheated,  always  ready 
to  take  a  back  seat,  timid,  complying, 
undecided,  obstinate  but  not  combative, 
selfish  but  not  self-asserting,  always  the 


58  MYBOYHOOD 

easy  victims  of  pushing,  coarse-grained, 
designing  men.  As  with  Father,  the  word 
came  easy  but  the  blow  was  slow  to  follow. 
Only  a  year  or  two  ago  a  lightning-rod 
man  made  my  brother  Curtis  and  his  son 
John  have  his  rods  put  upon  their  barn 
against  their  wills.  They  did  not  want  his 
rods  but  could  not  say  "No"  with  enough 
force.  He  simply  held  them  up  and  made 
them  take  his  rods,  willy  nilly.  Curtis 
had  maps,  books,  washing  machines,  etc., 
forced  upon  him  in  the  same  way.  I  am 
able  to  resist  the  tree  men,  book  agents, 
&tc.,  and  the  lightning-rod  man,  for  a 
wonder,  found  me  a  decided  non-conductor; 
but  I  can  see  how  my  weaker  brothers 
failed.  I  have  settled  a  lawsuit  rather  than 
fight  it  out  when  I  knew  law  and  justice 
were  on  my  side.  My  wife  has  often  said 
that  I  never  knew  when  I  was  imposed 
upon.  I  may  know  it  and  yet  feel  that 
resenting  it  would  cause  me  more  pain  than 
the  affront  did.  Strife  and  contention 
kill  me,  yet  come  easy  to  me,  and  did  to 


MYBOYHOOD  59 

all  my  family.  My  sense  of  personal  dig 
nity,  personal  honour,  is  not  a  plant  of  such 
tender  growth  that  it  cannot  stand  rough 
winds  and  nipping  frosts.  That  is  a  flatter 
ing  way  of  saying  that  we  are  a  very  non- 
chivalrous  tribe  and  would  rather  run 
away  than  fight  any  time.  During  the 
anti-rent  war  in  Delaware  County  in  1844, 
Father,  who  was  a  "down  renter/' once  fled 
to  a  neighbour's  house  when  he  saw  the 
posse  coming  and  took  refuge  under  the 
bed,  leaving  his  feet  sticking  out.  Father 
never  denied  it  and  never  seemed  a  bit 
humiliated  when  twitted  about  it.  Grand 
father  Kelly  seems  to  have  used  up  all  our 
fighting  blood  in  campaigning  with  Wash 
ington,  though  I  more  than  half  suspect 
that  our  noncombativeness  comes  from  the 
paternal  side  of  the  family.  As  a  school 
boy  I  never  had  a  fight,  nor  have  I  ever 
dealt  or  received  a  hostile  blow  since. 
And  I  never  saw  but  one  of  my  brothers 
fight  at  school,  and  he  fought  the  meanest 
boy  in  school  and  punished  him  well.  I 


60  MYBOYHOOD 

can  see  him  now,  sitting  on  the  prostrate 
form  of  the  boy,  with  his  hands  clinched 
in  the  boy's  hair  and  jamming  his  face 
down  into  the  crusty  snow  till  the  blood 
streamed  down  his  face.  The  nearest  I 
ever  came  to  a  fight  at  school  was  when, 
one  noontime,  we  were  playing  baseball 
and  a  boy  of  my  own  age  and  size  got 
angry  at  me  and  dared  me  to  lay  my  hand 
on  him.  I  did  it  quickly,  but  his  bite  did 
not  follow  his  bark.  I  was  never  whipped 
at  school  or  at  home  that  I  can  remember, 
though  I  no  doubt  often  deserved  it.  There 
was  a  good  deal  of  loud  scolding  in  our 
family  but  very  few  blows. 

Father  and  Mother  had  a  pretty  hard 
struggle  to  pay  for  the  farm  and  to  clothe 
and  feed  and  school  us  all.  We  lived  off 
the  products  of  the  farm  to  an  extent  that 
people  do  not  think  of  doing  nowadays. 
Not  only  was  our  food  largely  home  grown 
but  our  clothes  also  were  home  grown  and 
home  spun.  In  my  early  youth  our  house 
linen  and  our  summer  shirts  and  trousers 


MY     BOYHOOD  6l 

were  made  from  flax  that  grew  on  the  farm. 
Those  pioneer  shirts,  how  vividly  I  remem 
ber  them!  They  dated  from  the  stump, 
and  bits  of  the  stump  in  the  shape  of 
"shives"  were  inwoven  in  their  texture 
and  made  the  wearer  of  them  an  unwilling 
penitent  for  weeks,  or  until  use  and  the 
washboard  had  subdued  them.  Peas  in 
your  shoes  are  no  worse  than  "shives"  on 
your  shirt.  But  those  tow  shirts  stood  by 
you.  If  you  lost  your  hold  in  climbing  a 
tree  and  caught  on  a  limb  your  shirt  or 
your  linen  trousers  would  hold  you.  The 
stuff  from  which  they  were  made  had  a 
history  behind  it — pulled  up  by  the  roots, 
rooted  on  the  ground,  broken  with  a  crackle, 
flogged  with  a  swingle,  and  drawn  through  a 
hetchel,  and  out  of  all  this  ordeal  came  the 
flax.  How  clearly  I  remember  Father  work 
ing  with  it  in  the  bright,  sharp  March  days, 
breaking  it,  then  swingling  it  with  a  long 
wooden  sword-like  tool  over  the  end  of  an 
upright  board  fixed  at  the  base  in  a  heavy 
block.  This  was  to  separate  the  brittle 


62  MYBOYHOOD 

fragments  of  the  bark  from  the  fibres  of 
the  flax.  Then  in  large  handfuls  he  drew 
it  through  the  hetchel — an  instrument  with 
a  score  or  more  long  sharp  iron  teeth,  set  in 
a  board,  row  behind  row.  This  combed 
out  the  tow  and  other  worthless  material. 
It  was  a  mighty  good  discipline  for  the 
flax;  it  straightened  out  its  fibres  and  made 
it  as  clear  and  straight  as  a  girl's  tresses. 
Out  of  the  tow  we  twisted  bag  strings,  flail 
strings,  and  other  strings.  With  the  worth 
less  portions  we  made  huge  bonfires.  The 
flax,  Mother  would  mass  upon  her  distaff 
and  spin  into  threads.  The  last  I  saw  of 
the  old  crackle,  fifty  or  more  years  ago,  it 
served  as  a  hen  roost  under  the  shed,  and 
the  savage  old  hetchel  was  doing  duty 
behind  the  old  churner  when  he  sulked  and 
pulled  back  so  as  to  stop  the  churning 
machine.  It  was  hetcheling  wool  then 
instead  of  flax.  The  flax  was  spun  on  a 
quill  which  ran  by  the  foot  and  the  quills 
or  spools  holding  the  thread  were  used  in  a 
shuttle  when  the  cloth  was  woven.  The 


MYBOYHOOD  63 

old  loom  stood  in  the  hog-pen  chamber, 
and  there  Mother  wove  her  linen,  her  rag 
carpets,  and  her  woollen  goods.  I  have 
"quilled"  for  her  many  a  time — that  is, 
run  the  yarn  off  the  reel  into  spools  for  use 
in  the  shuttle. 

Father  had  a  flock  of  sheep  which  yielded 
wool  enough  for  our  stockings,  mittens, 
comforts,  and  underwear,  and  woollen  sheets 
and  comforts  for  the  beds.  I  have  some  of 
those  home-made  woollen  sheets  and  bed 
covers  now  at  Slabsides. 

Before  the  sheep  were  sheared  in  June 
they  were  driven  two  miles  to  the  creek 
to  be  washed.  Washing-sheep-day  was  an 
event  on  the  farm.  It  was  no  small  task 
to  get  the  sheep  off  the  mountain,  drive 
them  to  the  deep  pool  behind  old  Jonas 
More's  grist  mill,  pen  them  up  there,  and 
drag  them  one  by  one  into  the  water  and 
make  good  clean  Baptists  of  them!  But 
sheep  are  no  fighters,  they  struggle  for  a 
moment  and  then  passively  submit  to  the 
baptism.  My  older  brothers  usually  did 


64  MYBOYHOOD 

the  washing  and  I  the  herding.  When  the 
shearing  was  done,  a  few  days  later  the  poor 
creatures  were  put  through  another  ordeal, 
to  which  after  a  brief  struggle  they  quickly 
resigned  themselves.  Father  did  the  shear 
ing,  while  I  at  times  held  the  animal's  legs. 
Father  was  not  an  adept  hand  with  the  shears 
and  the  poor  beast  usually  had  to  part  with 
many  a  bit  of  her  hide  along  with  her  fleece. 
It  used  to  make  me  wince  as  much  as  it 
did  the  sheep  to  see  the  crests  of  those 
little  wrinkles  in  her  skin  clipped  off. 

I  used  to  wonder  how  the  sheep  knew 
one  another  and  how  the  lambs  knew  their 
mothers  when  shorn  of  their  fleeces.  But 
they  did.  The  wool  was  soon  sent  to  the 
fulling  mill  and  made  into  rolls,  though 
I  have  seen  it  carded  and  made  into  rolls 
at  home  by  hand.  How  many  bundles 
of  rolls  tied  up  into  sheets  I  have  seen  come 
home!  Then  in  the  long  summer  after 
noons  I  would  hear  the  hum  of  the  big 
spinning  wheel  in  the  chamber  and  hear 
the  tread  of  the  girl  as  she  ran  it,  walking 


MY     BOYHOOD  65 

to  and  fro  and  drawing  out  and  winding  up 
the  yarn.  The  white  rolls,  ten  inches  or 
more  long  and  the  thickness  of  one's  finger, 
would  lie  in  a  pile  on  the  beam  of  the  wheel 
and  one  by  one  would  be  attached  to  the 
spindle  and  drawn  out  into  yarn  of  the  right 
size.  Each  new  roll  was  welded  on  to  the 
end  of  the  one  that  went  before  it  so  that 
the  yarn  did  not  show  the  juncture.  But 
now  for  more  than  sixty  years  the  music 
of  the  spinning  wheel  has  not  been  heard  in 
the  land. 

Mother  used  to  pick  her  geese  in  the  barn 
where  Father  used  to  shear  the  sheep;  and 
to  help  gather  in  the  flock  was  a  part  of  my 
duty  also.  The  geese  would  submit  to 
the  plucking  about  as  readily  as  the  sheep 
to  the  shearing,  but  they  presented  a  much 
more  ragged  and  sorry  appearance  after 
they  had  been  fleeced  than  did  the  sheep. 
It  used  to  amuse  me  to  see  them  put  their 
heads  together  and  talk  it  over  and  laugh 
and  congratulate  each  other  over  the  vic 
tory  they  had  just  won! — they  had  got  out 


66  MYBOYHOOD 

of  the  hands  of  the  enemy  with  only  the 
loss  of  a  few  feathers  which  they  would  not 
want  in  the  warm  weather!  The  goose  is 
the  one  inhabitant  that  cackles  as  loudly 
and  as  cheerfully  over  a  defeat  as  over  a 
victory.  They  are  so  complacent  and  op 
timistic  that  it  is  a  comfort  to  me  to  see 
them  about.  The  very  silliness  of  the  goose 
is  a  lesson  in  wisdom.  The  pride  of  a 
plucked  gander  makes  one  take  courage. 
I  think  it  quite  probable  that  we  learned 
our  habit  of  hissing  our  dissent  from  the 
goose,  and  maybe  our  other  habit  of  trying 
sometimes  to  drown  an  opponent  with 
noise  has  a  like  origin.  The  goose  is  silly 
and  shallow-pated;  yet  what  dignity  and 
impressiveness  in  her  migrating  wild  clans 
driving  in  ordered  ranks  across  the  spring 
or  autumnal  skies,  linking  the  Chesapeake 
Bay  and  the  Canadian  Lakes  in  one  flight! 
The  great  forces  are  loosened  and  winter 
is  behind  them  in  one  case,  and  the  tides 
of  spring  bear  them  on  in  the  other.  When 
I  hear  the  trumpet  of  the  wild  geese  in  the 


MYBOYHOOD  67 

sky  I   know  that  dramatic  events  in  the 
seasonal  changes  are  taking  place. 

I  was  the  only  one  of  the  ten  children 
who,  as  Father  said,  "took  to  larnin'," 
though  in  seventy-five  years  of  poring  over 
books  and  periodicals  I  have  not  become 
"learned/'  But  I  easily  distanced  the  other 
children  in  school.  The  others  barely 
learned  to  read  and  write  and  cipher  a  little, 
Curtis  and  Wilson  barely  that,  Hiram 
got  into  Greenleaf  s  Grammar  and  learned 
to  parse,  but  never  to  write  or  speak  cor 
rectly,  and  he  ciphered  nearly  through 
DaybalPs  Arithmetic.  I  went  through 
Dayball  and  then  Thompkins  and  Perkins 
and  got  well  on  into  algebra  in  the  district 
school.  My  teacher,  however,  when  I  was 
about  thirteen  or  fourteen,  did  not  seem 
much  impressed  by  my  aptitude,  for  I 
recall  that  he  told  other  scholars,  boys  and 
girls  of  about  my  own  age,  to  get  them  each 
a  grammar,  but  did  not  tell  me.  I  felt  a 
little  slighted  but  made  up  my  mind  I  would 
have  a  grammar  also.  Father  refusing  to 


68  MYBOYHOOD 

buy  it  for  me,  I  made  small  cakes  of  maple 
sugar  in  the  spring  and,  peddling  them  in 
the  village,  got  money  enough  to  buy  the 
grammar  and  other  books.  The  teacher 
was  a  little  taken  aback  when  I  produced 
my  book  as  the  others  did  theirs,  but  he 
put  me  in  the  class  and  I  kept  along  with 
the  rest  of  them,  but  without  any  idea  that 
the  study  had  any  practical  bearing  on  our 
daily  speaking  and  writing.  That  teacher 
was  a  superior  man,  a  graduate  of  the  state 
normal  school  at  Albany,  but  I  failed  to 
impress  him  with  my  scholarly  aptitudes, 
which  certainly  were  not  remarkable.  But 
long  afterward,  when  he  had  read  some  of 
my  earlier  magazine  articles,  he  wrote  to 
me,  asking  if  I  were  indeed  his  early  farm 
boy  pupil.  His  interest  and  commendation 
gave  me  rare  pleasure.  I  had  at  last  justi 
fied  that  awkward  intrusion  into  his  gram 
mar  class.  Much  later  in  life,  after  he  had 
migrated  to  Kansas,  while  on  a  visit  East 
he  called  upon  me  when  I  chanced  to  be 
in  my  native  town.  This  gave  me  a  still 


MYBOYHOOD  69 

deeper  pleasure.  He  died  in  Kansas  many 
years  ago  and  is  buried  there.  I  have  jour 
neyed  through  the  state  many  times  and  al 
ways  remember  that  it  holds  the  ashes  of  my 
old  teacher.  It  is  a  satisfaction  for  me  to 
write  his  name,  James  Oliver,  in  this  record. 
I  was  in  many  respects  an  odd  one  in 
my  father's  family.  I  was  like  a  graft  from 
some  other  tree.  And  this  is  always  a  dis 
advantage  to  a  man — not  to  be  the  logical 
outcome  of  what  went  before  him,  not  to 
be  backed  up  by  his  family  and  inheritance 
— to  be  of  the  nature  of  a  sport.  It  seems 
as  if  I  had  more  intellectual  capital  than 
I  was  entitled  to  and  robbed  some  of  the 
rest  of  the  family,  while  I  had  a  full  measure 
of  the  family  weaknesses.  I  can  remember 
how  abashed  I  used  to  be  as  a  child  when 
strangers  or  relatives,  visiting  us  for  the 
first  time,  after  looking  the  rest  of  the 
children  over,  would  ask,  pointing  to  me, 
"That  is  not  your  boy — whose  is  he?" 
I  have  no  idea  that  I  looked  different  from 
the  others,  because  I  can  see  the  family 


7O  MYBOYHOOD 

stamp  upon  my  face  very  plainly  until 
this  day.  My  face  resembles  Hiram's  more 
than  any  of  the  others,  and  I  have  a  deeper 
attachment  for  him  than  for  any  of  the  rest 
of  my  brothers.  Hiram  was  a  dreamer,  too, 
and  he  had  his  own  idealism  which  expressed 
itself  in  love  of  bees,  of  which  he  kept  many 
hives  at  one  time,  and  of  fancy  stock, 
sheep,  pigs,  poultry,  and  a  desire  to  see 
other  lands.  His  bees  and  fancy  stock 
never  paid  him,  but  he  always  expected 
they  would  the  next  year.  But  they  yielded 
him  honey  and  wool  of  a  certain  intangible, 
satisfying  kind.  To  be  the  owner  of  a 
Cotswold  ram  or  ewe  for  which  he  had  paid 
one  hundred  dollars  or  more  gave  him  rare 
satisfaction.  One  season,  in  his  innocence, 
he  took  some  of  his  fancy  sheep  to  the  state 
fair  at  Syracuse,  not  knowing  that  an  un 
known  outsider  stood  no  chance  at  all  on 
such  an  occasion. 

Hiram  always  had  to  have  some  sort  of  a 
plaything.  Though  no  hunter  and  an  in 
different  marksman,  he  had  during  his  life 


MYBOYHOOD  71 

several  fancy  rifles.  Once  when  he  came 
to  Washington  to  visit  me,  he  brought 
his  rifle  with  him,  carrying  the  naked 
weapon  in  his  hand  or  upon  his  shoulder. 
The  act  was  merely  the  whim  of  a  boy  who 
likes  to  take  his  playthings  with  him. 
Hiram  certainly  had  not  come  to  "shoot 
up"  the  town.  In  the  early  '6o's  he  had  a 
fifty-dollar  rifle  made  by  a  famous  rifle 
maker  in  Utica.  There  was  some  hitch 
or  misunderstanding  about  it  and  Hiram 
made  the  trip  to  Utica  on  foot.  I  was  at 
home  that  summer  and  I  recall  seeing  him 
start  off  one  June  day,  wearing  a  black  coat, 
bent  on  his  fifty-mile  walk  to  see  about 
his  pet  rifle.  Of  course  nothing  came  of  it. 
The  rifle  maker  had  Hiram's  money,  and 
he  put  him  off  with  fair  words;  then  some 
thing  happened  and  the  gun  never  came 
to  Hiram's  hand. 

Another  plaything  of  his  was  a  kettle 
drum  with  which  he  amused  himself  in  the 
summer  twilight  for  many  seasons.  Then 
he  got  a  bass  drum  which  Curtis  learned 


72  MYBOYHOOD 

to  play,  and  a  very  warlike  sound  often 
went  up  from  the  peaceful  old  homestead. 
When  I  was  married  and  came  driving  home 
one  October  twilight  with  my  wife,  the 
martial  music  began  as  soon  as  we  hove 
in  sight  of  the  house.  Early  in  the  Civil 
War,  Hiram  seriously  talked  of  enlisting  as 
a  drummer,  but  Father  and  Mother  dis 
suaded  him.  I  can  see  what  a  wretched 
homesick  boy  he  would  have  been  before 
one  week  had  passed.  For  many  years 
he  was  haunted  with  a  desire  to  go  West, 
and  made  himself  really  believe  that  the 
next  month  or  the  month  after  he  would  go. 
He  kept  his  valise  packed  under  his  bed 
for  more  than  a  year,  to  be  ready  when  the 
impulse  grew  strong  enough.  One  fall 
it  became  strong  enough  to  start  him  and 
carried  him  as  far  as  White  Pigeon,  Mich 
igan,  where  it  left  him  stranded.  After 
visiting  a  cousin  who  lived  there  he  came 
back,  and  henceforth  his  Western  fever 
assumed  only  a  low,  chronic  type. 

I  tell  you  all  these  things  about  Hiram 


MYBOYHOOD  73 

because  I  am  a  chip  out  of  the  same  block 
and  see  myself  in  him.  His  vain  regrets, 
his  ineffectual  resolutions,  his  day-dreams, 
and  his  playthings — do  I  not  know  them 
all? — only  nature  in  some  way  dealt  a  little 
more  liberally  with  me  and  made  many 
of  my  dreams  come  true.  The  dear 
brother! — he  stood  next  to  Father  and 
Mother  to  me.  How  many  times  he  broke 
the  path  for  me  through  the  winter  snows 
on  the  long  way  to  school!  How  faithful 
he  was  to  write  to  me  and  to  visit  me  wher 
ever  I  was,  after  I  left  home!  How  he 
longed  to  follow  my  example  and  break 
away  from  the  old  place  but  could  never 
quite  screw  his  courage  up  to  the  sticking 
point!  He  never  read  one  of  my  books 
but  he  rejoiced  in  all  the  good  fortune  that 
was  mine.  Once  when  I  was  away  at  school 
and  fell  short  of  money,  Hiram  sent  me  a 
small  sum  when  Father  could  not  or  would 
not  send.  In  later  life  he  got  it  paid  back 
manyfold — and  what  a  satisfaction  it  was  to 
me  thus  to  repay  him ! 


74  MYBOYHOOD 

Hiram  was  always  a  child,  he  never  grew 
up,  which  is  true  of  all  of  us,  more  or  less, 
and  true  of  Father  also.  I  was  an  odd  one, 
but  I  shared  all  the  family  infirmities.  In 
fact,  I  have  always  been  an  odd  one  amid 
most  of  my  human  relations  in  life.  Place 
me  in  a  miscellaneous  gathering  of  men  and 
I  separate  from  them,  or  they  from  me, 
like  oil  from  water.  I  do  not  mix  readily 
with  my  fellows.  I  am  not  conscious  of 
drawing  into  my  shell,  as  the  saying  is,  but 
I  am  conscious  of  a  certain  strain  put  upon 
me  by  those  about  me.  I  suppose  my  shell 
or  my  skin  is  too  thin.  Burbank  experi 
mented  with  walnuts  trying  to  produce 
one  with  a  thin  shell,  till  he  finally  produced 
one  with  so  thin  a  shell  that  the  birds  ate 
it  up.  Well,  the  birds  eat  me  up  for  the 
same  reason,  if  I  don't  look  out.  I  am 
social  but  not  gregarious.  I  do  not  thrive 
in  clubs,  I  do  not  smoke,  or  tell  stories,  or 
drink,  or  dispute,  or  keep  late  hours.  I  am 
usually  as  solitary  as  a  bird  of  prey,  though 
I  trust  not  for  the  same  reason.  I  love 


MYBOYHOOD  75 

so  much  to  float  on  the  current  of  my  own 
thoughts.  I  mix  better  with  farmers,  work 
ers,  and  country  people  generally  than 
with  professional  or  business  men.  Birds 
of  a  feather  do  flock  together,  and  if  we  do 
not  feel  at  ease  in  our  company  we  may  be 
sure  we  are  in  the  wrong  flock.  Once 
while  crossing  the  continent  at  some  station 
in  Minnesota  a  gray-bearded  farmer-like 
man  got  on  the  train  and  presently  began 
to  look  eagerly  about  the  Pullman  as  if 
to  see  what  kind  of  company  he  was  in. 
After  a  while  his  eye  settled  on  me  at  the 
other  end  of  the  car.  In  a  few  minutes  he 
came  over  to  me  and  sat  down  beside  me 
and  began  to  tell  me  his  story.  He  had 
come  from  Germany  as  a  young  man  and 
had  lived  fifty  years  on  a  farm  in  Minnesota 
and  now  he  was  going  back  to  visirthe  coun 
try  of  his  birth.  He  had  prospered  and 
had  left  his  sons  in  charge  of  his  farm.  What 
an  air  he  had  of  a  boy  out  of  school !  The 
adventure  was  warming  his  blood;  he  was 
going  home  and  he  wanted  someone  to 


76  MYBOYHOOD 

whom  he  could  tell  the  good  news.  I  was 
probably  the  only  real  countryman  in  the 
car  and  he  picked  me  out  at  once,  some 
quality  of  rural  things  hovered  about  us 
both  and  drew  us  together.  I  felt  that 
he  had  paid  me  an  involuntary  compliment. 
How  unsophisticated  and  communicative  he 
was !  So  much  so  that  I  took  it  upon  myself 
to  caution  him  against  the  men  he  was 
liable  to  fall  in  with  in  New  York.  I  should 
like  to  know  if  he  reached  the  fatherland 
safely  and  returned  to  his  Minnesota  farm. 
When  I  was  a  boy  six  or  seven  years  old 
a  quack  phrenologist  stopped  at  our  house 
and  Father  kept  him  over  night.  In  the 
morning  he  fingered  the  bumps  of  all  of 
us  to  pay  for  his  lodging  and  breakfast. 
When  he  came  to  my  head  I  remember 
he  grew  enthusiastic.  "This  boy  will  be 
a  rich  man/'  he  said.  "His  head  beats 
'em  all."  And  he  enlarged  on  the  great 
wealth  I  was  to  accumulate.  I  forget 
the  rest;  but  that  my  bumps  were  nuggets 
of  gold  under  the  quack's  fingers,  this 


MYBOYHOOD  77 

I  have  not  forgotten.  The  prophecy  never 
came  true,  though  more  money  did  come 
my  way  than  to  any  of  the  rest  of  the 
family.  Three  of  my  brothers,  at  least, 
were  not  successful  from  a  business  point 
of  view,  and  while  I  myself  have  failed  in 
every  business  venture  1  ever  undertook — 
beginning  with  that  first  speculative  stroke 
sometime  in  the  'forties  when,  one  March 
morning,  I  purchased  the  prospective  sap 
of  Curtis's  two  maple  trees  for  four  cents; 
yet  a  certain  success  from  a  bread-and- 
butter  po.'nt  of  view  has  been  mine.  Father 
took  less  stock  in  me  than  in  the  other  boys 
— mainly,  I  suppose,  on  account  of  my 
early  proclivity  for  books;  hence  it  was  a 
deep  satisfaction  to  me,  when  his  other  sons 
had  failed  him  and  loaded  the  old  farm  with 
debt,  that  I  could  come  back  and  be  able 
to  take  the  burden  of  the  debts  upon  myself 
and  save  the  farm  from  going  into  strange 
hands.  But  it  was  my  good  fortune,  a 
kind  of  constitutional  good  luck  and  not 
any  business  talent  that  enabled  me  to  do 


78  MYBOYHOOD 

so.  Remembering  the  prediction  of  the  old 
quack  phrenologist,  I  used  to  have  my 
dreams  when  a  boy,  especially  on  one  occa 
sion,  I  remember,  when  I  was  tending  the 
sap  kettles  in  the  sugar  bush  on  a  bright 
April  day,  of  gaining  great  wealth  and  com 
ing  home  in  imposing  style  and  astonishing 
the  natives  with  my  display.  How  differ 
ent  the  reality  from  the  boy's  dream!  I 
came  back  indeed  with  a  couple  of  thousand 
dollars  in  my  pocket  (on  my  bank  book), 
sorrowing  and  oppressed,  more  like  a  pil 
grim  doing  penance  than  like  a  conqueror 
returning  from  his  victories.  But  we  kept 
the  old  farm,  and  as  you  know,  it  still 
plays  an  important  part  in  my  life  though 
I  passed  the  title  to  my  brother  many 
years  ago.  It  is  my  only  home,  other 
homes  that  I  have  had  were  mere  camping 
places  for  a  day  and  night.  But  the  wealth 
which  my  bumps  indicated  turned  out  to 
be  of  a  very  shadowy  and  uncommercial 
kind,  yet  of  a  kind  that  thieves  cannot 
steal  or  panics  disturb. 


MYBOYHOOD  79 

I  remember  the  first  day  I  went  to  school, 
probably  near  my  fifth  year.  It  was  at 
the  old  stone  school  house,  about  one  and 
a  half  miles  from  home.  I  recall  vividly 
the  suit  Mother  made  for  the  occasion  out 
of  some  striped  cotton  goods  with  a  pair  of 
little  flaps  or  hound's  ears  upon  my  shoulders 
that  tossed  about  as  I  ran.  I  accompanied 
Oily  Ann,  my  oldest  sister.  At  each  one 
of  the  four  houses  we  passed  on  the  way 
I  asked,  "Who  lives  there? "  I  have  no 
recollection  of  what  happened  at  school 
those  first  days,  but  I  remember  struggling 
with  the  alphabet  soon  thereafter ;  the  letters 
were  arranged  in  a  column,  the  vowels 
first,  a,  e,  i,  o,  u,  and  then  the  consonants. 
The  teacher  would  call  us  to  her  chair  three 
or  four  times  a  day,  and  opening  the  Cobb's 
spelling-book,  point  to  the  letters  one  by 
one  and  ask  me  to  name  them,  drilling 
them  into  me  in  that  way.  I  remember 
that  one  of  the  boys,  older  than  I,  Hen 
Meeker,  on  one  occasion  stuck  on  "e."  "Til 
bet  little  Johnny  Burris  can  tell  what 


8O  MYBOYHOOD 

that  letter  is.  Come  up  here,  Johnny." 
Up  I  went  and  promptly  answered,  to  the 
humiliation  of  Hen,  "e."  "I  told  you  so/' 
said  the  school  marm.  How  long  it  took 
me  to  learn  the  alphabet  in  this  arbitrary 
manner  I  do  not  know.  But  I  remember 
tackling  the  a,  b,  abs,  and  slowly  mastering 
those  short  columns.  I  remember  also 
getting  down  under  the  desk  and  tickling 
the  bare  ankles  of  the  big  girls  that  sat  in 
the  seat  in  front  of  me. 

The  summer  days  were  long  and  little 
boys  must  sit  on  the  hard  seats  and  be 
quiet  and  go  out  only  at  the  regular  recess. 
The  seat  I  sat  on  was  a  slab  turned  flat 
side  up  and  supported  on  four  legs  cut  from 
a  sapling.  My  feet  did  not  touch  the  floor 
and  I  suppose  I  got  very  tired.  One  after 
noon  the  oblivion  of  sleep  came  over  me 
and  when  I  came  to  consciousness  again 
I  was  in  a  neighbour's  house  on  a  couch 
and  the  "smell  of  camphor  pervaded  the 
room."  I  had  fallen  off  the  seat  backward 
and  hit  my  head  on  the  protruding  stones 


MYBOYHOOD  8l 

of  the  unplastered  wall  behind  me  and  cut 
a  hole  in  it,  and  I  suppose  for  the  moment 
effectively  scattered  my  childish  wits.  But 
Mrs.  Reed  was  a  motherly  body  and  con 
soled  me  with  flowers  and  sweets  and 
bathed  my  wounds  with  camphor  and  I 
suppose  little  Johnny  was  soon  himself 
again.  I  have  often  wondered  if  a  small 
bony  protuberance  on  the  back  of  my 
head  dated  from  that  collision  with  the  old 
stone  school  house. 

Another  early  remembrance  connected 
with  the  old  stone  school  house  is  that  of 
seeing  Hiram,  during  the  summer  noons, 
catch  fish  in  a  pail  back  of  old  Jonas  More's 
grist  mill  and  put  them  in  the  pot  holes  in 
the  red  sandstone  rocks,  to  be  kept  there 
till  we  went  home  at  night.  Then  he  took 
them  in  his  dinner  pail  and  put  them  in  his 
pond  down  in  the  pasture  lot.  I  suspect 
that  it  was  this  way  that  chubs  were  in 
troduced  into  the  West  Settlement  trout 
stream.  The  fish  used  to  swim  around  and 
around  in  the  pot  holes  seeking  a  way  to 


82  MY     BOY  HOOD 

escape.  I  would  put  my  finger  into  the 
water  but  jerk  it  back  quickly  as  the  fish 
came  around.  I  was  afraid  of  them.  But 
before  that  I  was  once  scared  into  a  panic 
by  a  high-soaring  hen  hawk.  I  have  prob 
ably  pointed  out  to  you  where,  one  summer 
day,  as  I  was  going  along  the  road  out  on 
what  we  called  the  big  hill,  I  looked  sky 
ward  and  saw  a  big  hen  hawk  describing 
his  large  circles  about  me.  A  sudden  fear 
fell  upon  me,  and  I  took  refuge  behind  the 
stone  wall.  Still  earlier  in  my  career  I 
had  my  first  panic  farther  along  on  this  same 
road.  I  suppose  I  had  started  off  on  my 
first  journey  to  explore  the  world  when, 
getting  well  down  the  Deacon  road  beside 
the  woods,  I  looked  back  and,  seeing  how 
far  I  was  from  home,  was  seized  with  a  sud 
den  consternation  and  turned  and  ran  back 
as  fast  as  I  could  go.  I  have  seen  a  young 
robin  do  the  same  thing  when  it  had  wan 
dered  out  a  yard  or  so  on  the  branch  away 
from  its  nest. 

I  mastered  only  my  a-b-c's  at  the  old 


MYBOYHOOD  83 

stone  school  house.  A  year  or  two  later 
we  were  sent  off  in  the  West  Settlement 
district  and  I  went  to  school  at  a  little  un- 
painted  school  house  with  a  creek  on  one 
side  of  it  and  toeing  squarely  on  the  high 
way  on  the  other.  This  also  was  about  one 
and  a  half  miles  from  home,  an  easy,  adven 
turous  journey  in  the  summer  with  the  many 
allurements  of  fields,  stream,  and  wood, 
but  in  winter  often  a  battle  with  snow  and 
cold.  In  winter  we  went  across  lots,  my 
elder  brothers  breaking  a  path  through  the 
fields  and  woods.  How  the  tracks  in  the 
snow — squirrels,  hares,  skunks,  foxes — used 
to  excite  my  curiosity!  And  the  line  of 
ledges  oif  on  the  left  in  the  woods  where 
brother  Wilson  used  to  set  traps  for  skunks 
and  coons — how  they  haunted  my  imagina 
tion  as  I  caught  dim  glimpses  of  them, 
trudging  along  in  our  narrow  path!  One 
mild  winter  morning,  after  I  had  grown  to 
be  a  boy  of  twelve  or  thirteen,  my  younger 
brother  and  I  had  an  adventure  with  a  hare. 
He  sat  in  his  form  in  the  deep  snow  between 


84  MYBOYHOOD 

the  roots  of  a  maple  tree  that  stood  beside 
the  path.  We  were  almost  upon  him  before 
we  discovered  him.  As  he  did  not  move  I 
withdrew  a  few  yards  to  a  stone  wall  and 
armed  myself  with  a  boulder  the  size  of 
my  fist.  Returning,  I  let  drive,  sure  of  my 
game,  but  I  missed  by  a  foot,  and  the  hare 
bounded  away  over  the  wall  and  out 
into  the  open  and  off  for  the  hemlocks  a 
quarter  of  a  mile  away.  A  rabbit  in  his 
form  only  ten  feet  away  does  not  so  easily 
become  a  rabbit  in  the  hand.  This  desire 
of  the  farm  boy  to  slay  every  wild  creature 
he  saw  was  universal  in  my  time.  I  trust 
things  have  changed  in  this  respect  since 
then. 

At  the  little  old  school  house  I  had  many 
teachers,  Bill  Bouton,  Bill  Allaben,  Taylor 
Grant,  Jason  Powell,  Rossetti  Cole,  Rebecca 
Scudder,  and  others.  I  got  well  into  Day- 
ball's  Arithmetic,  Olney's  Geography,  and 
read  Hall's  History  of  the  United  States- 
through  the  latter  getting  quite  familiar 
with  the  Indian  wars  and  the  French  war 


MYBOYHOOD  85 

and  the  Revolution.  Some  books  in  the 
district  library  also  attracted  me.  I  think 
I  was  the  only  one  of  the  family  that  took 
books  from  the  library.  I  recall  especially 
"Murphy,  the  Indian  Killer"  and  the 
"Life  of  Washington."  The  latter  took 
hold  of  me;  I  remember  one  summer 
Sunday,  as  I  was  playing  through  the  house 
with  my  older  brothers,  of  stopping  to  read 
a  certain  passage  of  it  aloud,  and  that  it 
moved  me  so  that  I  did  not  know  whether 
I  was  in  the  body  or  out.  Many  times  I 
read  that  passage  and  every  time  I  was  sub 
merged,  as  it  were,  by  a  wave  of  emotion. 
I  mention  so  trifling  a  matter  only  to  show 
how  responsive  I  was  to  literature  at  an 
early  age.  I  should  perhaps  offset  this 
statement  by  certain  other  facts  which  are 
by  no  means  so  flattering.  There  was  a 
period  in  my  latter  boyhood  when  comic 
song-books,  mostly  of  the  Negro  minstrely 
sort,  satisfied  my  craving  for  poetic  litera 
ture.  I  used  to  learn  the  songs  by  heart 
and  invent  and  extemporize  tunes  for  them, 


86  MYBOYHOOD 

To  this  day  I  can  repeat  some  of  those  rank 
Negro  songs. 

My  taste  for  books  began  early,  but  my 
taste  for  good  literature  was  of  a  much 
later  and  of  slow  growth.  My  interest  in 
theological  and  scientific  questions  ante 
dated  my  love  of  literature.  During  the 
last  half  of  my  'teens  I  was  greatly  inter 
ested  in  phrenology  and  possessed  a  copy  of 
Spurzheim's  "Phrenology,"  and  of  Comb's 
"Constitution  of  Man."  I  also  subscribed 
to  Fowler's  Phrenological  Journal  and  for 
years  accepted  the  phrenologists'  own  esti 
mate  of  the  value  of  their  science.  And 
I  still  see  some  general  truths  in  it.  The 
size  and  shape  of  the  brain  certainly  give 
clues  to  the  mind  within,  but  its  subdivision 
into  many  bumps,  or  numerous  small  areas, 
like  a  garden  plot,  from  each  one  of  which 
a  different  crop  is  produced,  is  absurd. 
Certain  bodily  functions  are  localized  in 
the  brain,  but  not  our  mental  and  emotional 
traits — veneration,  self-esteem,  sublimity — 
these  are  attributes  of  the  mind  as  a  unit. 


MYBOYHOOD  87 

As  I  write  these  lines  I  am  trying  to  see 
wherein  I  differed  from  my  brothers  and 
from  other  boys  of  my  acquaintance.  I 
certainly  had  a  livelier  interest  in  things 
and  events  about  me.  When  Mr.  Mc- 
Laurie  proposed  to  start  an  academy  in 
the  village  and  came  there  to  feel  the  pulse 
of  the  people  and  to  speak  upon  the  subject 
I  believe  I  was  the  only  boy  in  his  audience. 
I  was  probably  ten  or  twelve  years  of  age. 
At  one  point  in  his  address  the  speaker  had 
occasion  to  use  me  to  illustrate  his  point: 
"About  the  size  of  that  boy  there,"  he  said, 
pointing  to  me,  and  my  face  flushed  with 
embarrassment.  The  academy  was  started 
and  I  hoped  in  a  few  years  to  attend  it. 
But  the  time  when  Father  could  see  his  way 
to  send  me  there  never  came.  One  season 
when  I  was  fifteen  or  sixteen,  I  set  my  heart 
on  going  to  school  at  Harpersfield.  A  boy 
whom  I  knew  in  the  village  attended  it 
and  I  wanted  to  accompany  him.  Father 
talked  encouragingly  and  held  it  out  as 
a  possible  reward  if  I  helped  hurry  the 


88  MY    BOYHOOD 

farm  work  along.  This  I  did,  and  for  the 
first  time  taking  to  field  with  the  team 
and  plough  and  "summer  fallowing"  one  of 
the  oat-stubble  lots.  I  followed  the  plough 
those  September  days  with  dreams  of  Har- 
persfield  Academy  hovering  about  me,  but 
the  reality  never  came.  Father  concluded, 
after  I  had  finished  my  job  of  ploughing, 
that  he  could  not  afford  it.  Butter  was  low 
and  he  had  too  many  other  ways  for  using 
his  money.  I  think  it  quite  possible  that 
my  dreams  gave  me  the  best  there  was  in 
Harpersfield  anyway — a  worthy  aspiration 
is  never  lost.  All  these  things  differentiate 
me  from  my  brothers. 

My  interest  in  theological  questions 
showed  itself  about  the  same  time.  An 
itinerant  lecturer  with  a  smooth,  ready 
tongue  came  to  the  village  charged  with 
novel  ideas  about  the  immortality  of  the 
soul,  accepting  the  literal  truth  of  the  text 
"The  soul  that  sinneth,  it  shall  die."  I 
attended  the  meetings  and  took  notes  of  the 
speaker's  glib  talk.  I  distinctly  remember 


-! 


MYBOYHOOD  89 

that  it  was  from  his  mouth  that  I  first  heard 
the  word  "encyclopaedia."  When  he  cited 
the  "Encyclopaedia  Britannica"  in  confir 
mation  of  some  statement,  I  had  no  doubt 
of  its  truth,  and  I  resolved  sometime  to 
get  my  hands  on  that  book.  I  still  have 
those  notes  and  references  that  I  took  sixty 
years  ago. 

At  a  much  earlier  stage  of  my  mental 
development  I  had  a  passion  for  drawing, 
but,  quite  unguided,  it  resulted  only  in  a 
waste  of  paper.  I  wanted  to  walk  before 
I  could  creep,  to  paint  before  I  could  draw, 
and  getting  a  box  of  cheap  water  colours, 
I  indulged  my  crude  artistic  instincts. 
My  most  ambitious  piece  was  a  picture  of 
General  Winfield  Scott  standing  beside 
his  horse  and  some  piece  of  artillery,  which 
I  copied  from  a  print.  It  was  of  course 
an  awful  daub,  but  in  connection  with  it 
I  heard  for  the  first  time  a  new  word, 
— the  word  "taste"  used  in  its  aesthetic 
sense.  One  of  the  neighbour  women  was 
calling  at  the  house,  and  seeing  my  picture 


9O  MYBOYHOOD 

said  to  Mother,  "What  taste  that  boy 
has."  That  application  of  the  word  made 
an  impression  on  me  that  I  have  never  for 
gotten. 

About  this  time  I  heard  another  new 
word.  We  were  working  on  the  road,  and 
I  with  my  hoe  was  working  beside  an  old 
Quaker  farmer,  David  Corbin,  who  used 
to  be  a  school  teacher.  A  large  flat  stone 
was  turned  over,  and  beneath  it  in  some 
orderly  arrangement  were  some  smaller 
stones.  "Here  are  some  antiquities/'  said 
Mr.  Corbin,  and  my  vocabulary  re 
ceived  another  addition.  A  new  word  or  a 
new  thing  was  very  apt  to  make  its  mark 
upon  my  mind.  I  have  told  elsewhere 
what  a  revelation  to  me  was  my  first  glimpse 
of  one  of  the  warblers,  the  black-throated 
blue-back,  indicating  as  it  did  a  world  of 
bird  life  of  which  I  had  never  dreamed, 
the  bird  life  in  the  inner  heart  of  the  woods. 
My  brothers  and  other  boys  were  with  me 
but  they  did  not  see  the  new  bird.  The 
first  time  I  saw  the  veery,  or  Wilson's 


MYBOYHOOD  §1 

thrush,  also  stands  out  in  my  memory. 
It  alighted  in  the  road  before  us  on  the  edge 
of  the  woods.  "A  brown  thrasher,"  said 
Bill  Chase.  It  was  not  the  thrasher  but 
it  was  a  new  bird  to  me  and  the  picture  of 
it  is  in  my  mind  as  if  made  only  yesterday. 
Natural  History  was  a  subject  unknown 
to  me  in  my  boyhood,  and  such  a  thing  as 
nature  study  in  the  schools  was  of  course 
unheard  of.  Our  natural  history  we  got 
unconsciously  in  the  sport  at  noon  time,  or 
on  our  way  to  and  from  school  or  in  our 
Sunday  excursions  to  the  streams  and  woods. 
We  learned  much  about  the  ways  of  foxes 
and  woodchucks  and  coons  and  skunks 
and  squirrels  by  hunting  them.  The  par 
tridge,  too,  and  the  crows,  hawks,  and  owls, 
and  the  song  birds  of  the  field  and  orchard, 
all  enter  into  the  farm  boy's  life.  I  early 
became  familiar  with  the  songs  and  habits 
of  all  the  common  birds,  and  with  field 
mice  and  the  frogs,  toads,  lizards,  and 
snakes.  Also  with  the  wild  bees  and  wasps. 
One  season  I  made  a  collection  of  bumble- 


92  MYBOYHOOD 

bee  honey,  studying  the  habits  of  five  or 
six  different  kinds  and  rifling  their  nests. 
I  kept  my  store  of  bumble-bee  honey  in  the 
attic  where  I  had  a  small  box  full  of  the 
comb  and  a  large  phial  filled  with  the  honey. 
How  well  I  came  to  know  the  different 
dispositions  of  the  various  kinds — the  small 
red-vested  that  made  its  nest  in  a  hole  in 
the  ground;  the  small  black- vested,  the 
large  black-vested,  the  yellow-necked,  the 
black-banded,  etc.,  that  made  their  nests 
in  old  mice  nests  in  the  meadow  or  in  the 
barn  and  other  places.  I  used  to  watch 
and  woo  the  little  piping  frogs  in  the  spring 
marshes  when  I  had  driven  the  cows  to 
pasture  at  night,  till  they  would  sit  in  my 
open  hand  and  pipe.  I  used  to  creep  on 
my  hands  and  knees  through  the  woods 
to  see  the  partridge  in  the  act  of  drumming. 
I  used  to  watch  the  mud  wasps  building 
their  nests  in  the  old  attic  and  noted  their 
complaining  cry  while  in  the  act  of  pressing 
on  the  mud.  I  noted  the  same  complaining 
cry  from  the  bees  when  working  on  the 


MYBOYHOOD  93 

flower  of  the  purple-flowering  raspberry, 
what  we  called  ''Scotch  caps."  I  tried  to 
trap  foxes  and  soon  learned  how  far  the 
fox's  cunning  surpassed  mine.  My  first 
lesson  in  animal  psychology  I  got  from  old 
Nat  Higby  as  he  came  riding  by  on  horse 
back  one  winter  day,  his  huge  feet  almost 
meeting  under  the  horse,  just  as  a  hound 
was  running  a  fox  across  our  upper  moun 
tain  lot.  "My  boy/'  he  said,  "that  fox 
may  be  running  as  fast  as  he  can,  but  if 
you  stood  behind  that  big  rock  beside  his 
course,  and  as  he  came  along  should  jump 
out  and  shout  'hello/  he  would  run  faster/' 
That  was  the  winter  when  in  fond  imagina 
tion  I  saw  a  stream  of  silver  dollars  coming 
my  way  from  the  red  foxes  I  was  planning 
to  deprive  of  their  pelts  when  they  needed 
them  most.  I  have  told  elsewhere  of  my 
trapping  experiences  and  how  completely 
I  failed. 

I  was  born  at  Roxbury,  N.  Y.,  April  3, 
1837.  At  least  two  other  American  au 
thors  of  note  were  born  on  the  third  of 


94  MYBOYHOOD 

April — Washington  Irving  and  Edward 
Everett  Hale.  The  latter  once  wrote  me 
a  birthday  letter  in  which  he  said,  among 
other  things,  "  I  have  been  looking  back 
over  my  diaries  to  see  what  I  was  doing 
the  day  you  were  being  born.  I  find  I 
was  undergoing  an  examination  in  logic  at 
Harvard  College."  The  only  other  Amer 
ican  author  born  in  1837  is  William  Dean 
Howells,  who  was  born  in  Ohio  in  March 
of  that  year. 

I  was  the  son  of  a  farmer,  who  was  the 
son  of  a  farmer,  who  was  again  the  son  of 
a  farmer.  There  are  no  professional  or 
commercial  men  in  my  line  for  several 
generations,  my  blood  has  the  flavour  of 
the  soil  in  it;  it  is  rural  to  the  last  drop.  I 
can  find  no  city  dwellers  in  the  line  of  my 
descent  in  this  country.  The  Burroughs 
tribe,  as  far  back  as  I  can  find  any  account 
of  them,  were  mainly  countrymen  and  tillers 
of  the  soil.  The  Rev.  George  Burroughs, 
who  was  hung  as  a  witch  at  Salem,  Mass., 
in  1694,  may  have  been  of  the  family, 


MY    BOYHOOD  95 

though  I  can  find  no  proof  of  it.  I  wanted 
to  believe  that  he  was  and  in  1898  I  made  a 
visit  to  Salem  and  to  Gallows  Hill  to  see  the 
spot  where  he,  the  last  victim  of  the  witch 
craft  craze,  ended  his  life.  There  is  no 
doubt  that  the  renegade  preacher,  Stephen 
Burroughs,  who  stole  a  lot  of  his  father's 
sermons  and  set  up  as  a  preacher  and  forger 
on  his  own  account  about  1720,  was  a  third 
or  fourth  cousin  of  my  father's. 

Farmers  with  a  decidedly  religious  bent 
contributed  the  main  elements  of  my  per 
sonality.  I  was  a  countryman  dyed  in 
the  wool,  yea,  more  than  that,  born  and 
bred  in  the  bone,  and  my  character  is 
fundamentally  reverent  and  religious.  The 
religion  of  my  fathers  underwent  in  me  a 
kind  of  metamorphosis  and  became  some 
thing  which  would  indeed  have  appeared 
like  rank  atheism  to  them,  but  which  was 
nevertheless  full  of  the  very  essence  of  true 
religion — love,  reverence,  wonder,  unworld- 
liness,  and  devotion  to  ideal  truth — but  in 
no  way  identified  with  Church  or  creed. 


96  MY    BOYHOOD 

I  used  to  feel  that  my  religious  tempera 
ment  was  as  clearly  traceable  to  the  hard 
Calvinism  of  my  fathers,  as  the  stratified 
sandstone  is  traceable  to  the  old  granite 
rock,  but  that  it  had  undergone  a  sea  change 
as  had  the  sandstone,  or  in  my  case  a  science 
change  through  the  activity  of  the  mind 
and  of  the  age  in  which  I  lived.  It  was 
rationalism  touched  with  mysticism  and 
warm  with  poetic  emotion. 

My  paternal  grandfather  and  great-grand 
father  came  from  near  Bridgeport  in  Con 
necticut  about  the  end  of  the  Revolution 
and  settled  in  Stamford,  Delaware  County, 
New  York.  Captain  Stephen  Burroughs 
of  Bridgeport,  a  mathematician  and  a  man 
of  note  in  his  time,  was  Father's  great  uncle. 
Father  used  to  say  that  his  uncle  Stephen 
could  build  a  ship  and  sail  it  around  the 
world.  The  family  name  is  still  common 
in  and  about  Bridgeport.  The  first  John 
Burroughs  of  whom  I  can  find  any  record 
came  to  this  country  from  the  West  Indies 
and  settled  in  Stratford,  Conn.,  about  1690. 


MYBOYHOOD  97 

He  had  ten  children,  and  ten  children  to 
a  family  was  the  rule  down  to  my  own 
father.  One  October  while  on  a  cruise 
with  a  small  motor  boat  on  Long  Island 
Sound,  stress  of  weather  compelled  us  to 
seek  shelter  in  Black  Rock  harbour,  which 
is  a  part  of  Bridgeport.  In  the  morning 
we  went  ashore,  and  as  we  were  walking 
up  a  street  seeking  the  trolley  line  to  take 
us  into  the  city,  we  saw  a  large  brick  build 
ing  with  the  legend  on  it — "The  Burroughs 
Home/'  I  felt  like  going  in  and  claiming 
its  hospitality — after  our  rough  experience 
on  the  Sound  its  look  and  its  name  were 
especially  inviting.  Some  descendant  of 
Captain  Stephen  Burroughs  was  probably 
its  founder. 

My  great-grandfather,  Ephraim,  I  be 
lieve,  died  in  1818,  and  was  buried  in  the 
town  of  Stamford  in  a  field  that  is  now 
cultivated.  My  grandfather,  Eden  Bur 
roughs,  died  in  Roxbury  in  1842,  aged  72, 
and  my  father,  Chauncey  A.  Burroughs,  in 
1 884  at  the  age  of  81. 


98  MYBOYHOOD 

My  maternal  grandfather,  Edmund  Kelly, 
was  Irish,  though  born  in  this  country 
about  1765.  It  is  from  his  Irish  strain  that 
I  get  many  of  my  Celtic  characteristics — 
my  decidedly  feminine  temperament.  I 
always  felt  that  I  was  more  a  Kelly  than  a 
Burroughs.  Grandfather  Kelly  was  a  small 
man,  with  a  big  head  and  marked  Irish 
features.  He  entered  the  Continental  army 
when  a  mere  lad  in  some  menial  capacity, 
but  before  the  end  he  carried  a  musket 
in  the  ranks.  He  was  with  Washington 
at  Valley  Forge  and  had  many  stories  to 
tell  of  their  hardships.  He  was  upward 
of  seventy-five  years  old  when  I  first  re 
member  him — a  little  man  in  a  blue  coat 
with  brass  buttons.  He  and  Granny  used 
to  come  to  our  house  once  or  twice  a  year 
for  a  week  or  two  at  a  time.  Their  perma 
nent  home  was  with  Uncle  Martin  Kelly 
in  Red  Kill,  eight  miles  away.  I  remember 
him  as  a  great  angler.  How  many  times 
in  the  May  or  June  mornings,  as  soon  as 
he  had  had  his  breakfast,  have  I  seen  him 


M  Y    B  O  YHOOD  99 

digging  worms  and  getting  ready  to  go 
a-fishing  up  Montgomery  Hollow  or  over 
in  Meeker's  Hollow,  or  over  in  West  Settle 
ment!  You  could  always  be  sure  he  would 
bring  home  a  nice  string  of  trout.  Occa 
sionally  I  was  permitted  to  go  with  him. 
How  nimbly  he  would  walk,  even  when  he 
was  over  eighty,  and  how  skilfully  he  would 
take  the  trout!  I  was  an  angler  myself 
before  I  was  ten,  but  Grandfather  would 
take  trout  from  places  in  the  stream  where 
I  would  not  think  it  worth  while  to  cast 
my  hook.  But  I  never  fished  when  I  went 
with  him,  I  carried  the  fish  and  watched 
him.  The  pull  home,  often  two  or  three 
miles,  tried  my  young  legs,  but  Grandfather 
would  show  very  little  fatigue,  and  I  know 
he  did  not  have  the  ravenous  hunger  I 
always  had  when  I  went  fishing,  so  much 
so  that  I  used  to  think  there  was  in  this 
respect  something  peculiar  about  going 
fishing.  One  hour  along  the  trout  streams 
would  develop  more  hunger  in  me  than  half 
a  day  hoeing  corn  or  working  on  the  road — 


IOO  MY    BOYHOOD 

a  peculiarly  fierce,  all-absorbing  desire  for 
food,  so  that  a  piece  of  rye  bread  and 
butter  was  the  most  delicious  thing  in  the 
world.  I  remember  that  one  June  day 
my  cousin  and  I,  when  we  were  about  seven 
or  eight  years  old,  set  out  for  Meeker's 
Hollow  for  trout.  It  was  a  pull  of  over 
two  miles  and  over  a  pretty  hard  hill. 
Our  courage  held  out  until  we  reached  the 
creek,  but  we  were  too  hungry  to  fish;  we 
turned  homeward  and  fed  upon  the  wild 
strawberries  in  the  pastures  and  meadows 
we  passed  through  and  they  kept  us  alive 
until  we  reached  home.  Oh,  that  youth 
ful  hunger  beside  the  trout  stream,  was 
there  ever  anything  else  like  it  in  the 
world ! 

Grandfather  Kelly  was  a  fisherman  nearly 
up  to  the  year  of  his  death  at  the  age  of 
eighty-eight.  He  had  few  of  the  world's 
goods  and  he  did  not  want  them.  His 
only  vice  was  plug  tobacco,  his  only  recrea 
tion  was  angling,  and  his  only  reading  the 
Bible.  How  long  and  attentively  would 


MY    BOYHQCm  \ 

he  pore  over  the  Book ! — but  I  never  heard 
him  comment  upon  it  or  express  any  reli 
gious  opinion  or  conviction.  He  believed 
in  witches  and  hobgoblins:  he  had  seen 
them  and  experienced  them  and  used  to 
tell  us  stories  that  almost  made  us  afraid 
of  our  own  shadows.  My  own  youthful 
horror  of  darkness,  and  of  dark  rooms  and 
recesses  and  cellars  even  in  the  daytime, 
was  due  no  doubt  largely  to  Grandfather's 
blood-curdling  tales.  Yet  I  may  be  wrong 
about  this,  for  I  remember  a  fearful  experi 
ence  I  had  when  I  was  a  child  of  three  or 
four  years.  I  see  myself  with  some  of  the 
other  children  cowering  in  a  corner  of  the 
old  kitchen  at  night  with  my  eyes  fixed 
on  the  black  space  of  the  open  door  of 
the  bedroom  occupied  by  my  father  and 
mother.  They  were  out  for  the  evening 
and  we  were  waiting  for  their  return. 
The  agony  of  that  waiting  I  shall  never 
forget.  Whether  or  not  the  other  children 
shared  my  fear  I  do  not  remember;  prob 
ably  they  did,  and  maybe  communicated 


1(52  MY     BOYHOOD 

their  fear  to  me.  I  could  not  take  my 
eyes  off  the  entrance  to  that  black  cavern, 
though  of  what  I  may  have  fancied  it 
held  that  would  hurt  me  I  have  no  idea. 
It  was  only  the  child's  inherited  fear  of  the 
dark,  the  unknown,  the  mysterious.  Grand 
father's  stories,  no  doubt,  strengthened  that 
fear.  It  clung  to  me  all  through  my  boy 
hood  and  until  my  fifteenth  or  sixteenth 
year  and  was  peculiarly  acute  about  my 
twelfth  and  thirteenth  years.  The  road 
through  the  woods  at  twilight,  the  barn, 
the  wagon  house,  the  cellar  set  my  imagina 
tion  on  tiptoe.  If  I  had  to  pass  the  burying 
ground  up  on  the  hill  by  the  roadside  in 
the  dark,  I  did  so  very  gingerly.  I  was  too 
scared  to  run  for  fear  the  ghosts  of  all  the 
dead  buried  there  would  be  at  my  heels. 

Probably  I  get  my  love  for  the  contem 
plative  life  and  for  nature  more  through 
my  mother  than  through  my  father;  Mother 
had  the  self-consciousness  of  the  Celt, 
Father  not  at  all,  though  he  had  the  Celtic 
temperament:  red  hair  and  freckles!  The 


MY    BOYHOOD  103 

red-haired,  freckled,  harsh-voiced  little  man 
made  a  great  deal  of  noise  about  the  farm 
— shouting  at  the  stock,  sending  the  dog 
after  the  cows  or  after  the  pigs  in  the  garden, 
or  calling  his  orders  to  us  in  the  field  or 
shouting  back  his  directions  for  the  work 
after  he  had  started  for  the  Beaver  Dam 
village.  But  his  bark  was  always  more 
to  be  feared  than  his  bite.  He  would 
threaten  loudly  but  punish  mildly  or  not 
at  all.  But  he  improved  the  fields,  he 
cleared  the  woods,  he  battled  with  the  rocks 
and  the  stones,  he  paid  his  debts  and  he 
kept  his  faith.  He  was  not  a  man  of  senti 
ment,  though  he  was  a  man  of  feeling. 
He  was  easily  moved  to  tears  and  had 
strong  religious  convictions  and  emotions. 
These  emotions  often  found  vent  in  his 
reading  his  hymn  book  aloud  in  a  curious 
undulating  sing-song  tone.  He  knew  noth 
ing  of  what  we  call  love  of  nature  and  he 
owed  little  or  nothing  to  books  after  his 
schoolboy  days.  He  usually  took  two 
weekly  publications — an  Albany  or  a  New 


IO4  MY     BOYHOOD 

York  newspaper  and  a  religious  paper  called 
The  Signs  of  the  Times,  the  organ  of  the 
Old  School  Baptist  Church,  of  which  he 
was  a  member.  He  never  asked  me  about 
my  own  books  and  I  doubt  that  he  ever 
looked  into  one  of  them.  How  far  the 
current  of  my  thoughts  and  interests  ran 
from  the  current  of  his  thoughts  and  in 
terests!  Literature  he  had  never  heard  of, 
science  and  philosophy  were  an  unknown 
world  to  him.  Religion  (hard  predestina- 
rianism),  politics  (democratic),  and  farming 
took  up  all  his  thoughts  and  time.  He  had 
no  desire  to  travel,  he  was  not  a  hunter 
or  fisherman,  and  the  shows  and  vanities 
of  the  world  disturbed  him  not.  When 
I  grew  to  crave  schooling  and  books  he  was 
disturbed  lest  I  become  a  Methodist  minis 
ter — his  special  aversion.  Religion  on  such 
easy  and  wholesale  terms  as  that  of  his 
Methodist  neighbours  made  his  nostrils 
dilate  with  contempt.  But  literature  was 
an  enemy  he  had  never  heard  of.  A  writer 
of  books  had  no  place  in  his  category  of 


MYBOYHOOD  1 05 

human  occupations;  and  as  for  a  poet,  he 
would  probably  have  ranked  him  with  the 
dancing  master.  Yet  late  in  life,  when  he 
saw  my  picture  in  a  magazine,  he  is  said  to 
have  shed  tears.  Poor  Father,  his  heart 
was  tender,  but  concerning  so  much  that 
fills  and  moves  the  world,  his  mind  was 
dark.  He  was  a  good  farmer,  a  helpful 
neighbour,  a  devoted  parent  and  husband, 
and  he  did  well  the  work  in  the  world  which 
fell  to  his  lot  to  do.  The  narrowness  and 
bigotry  of  his  class  and  church  and  time 
were  his,  but  probity  of  character,  ready 
good  will,  and  a  fervent  religious  nature 
were  his  also.  His  heart  was  much  softer 
than  his  creed.  He  might  scoff  at  his  neigh 
bour's  religion  or  politics,  but  he  was  ever 
ready  to  lend  him  a  hand. 

The  earliest  memory  I  can  recall  of  him 
dates  back  to  a  spring  day  in  my  early 
childhood.  The  "hired  girl"  had  thrown 
my  straw  hat  off  the  stonework  into  the 
road.  In  my  grief  and  helplessness  to 
punish  her  as  I  thought  she  merited,  I 


1 00  MY     BOYHOOD 

looked  up  to  the  side  hill  above  the  housj 
and  saw  Father  striding  across  the  ploughed 
ground  with  a  bag  strung  across  his  breast 
from  which  he  was  sowing  grain.  His 
measured  strides,  the  white  bag,  and  his 
regular  swinging  arm  made  a  picture  on 
the  background  of  the  red  soil,  all  height 
ened  no  doubt  by  my  excited  state  of  mind, 
that  stamped  itself  indelibly  upon  my 
memory.  He  strode  across  those  hills  with 
that  bag  suspended  around  his  neck,  sowing 
grain,  for  many  years. 

Another  spring  picture  of  him  much 
later  in  life,  when  I  was  a  man  grown  and 
home  on  a  visit,  comes  to  mind.  I  see  him 
following  a  team  of  horses  hitched  to  a 
harrow  across  a  ploughed  field,  dragging  in 
the  oats.  To  and  fro  he  goes  all  afternoon, 
the  dust  streaming  behind  him  and  the 
ground  smoothing  as  his  work  progressed 
I  suppose  I  had  a  feeling  that  I  should  have 
taken  his  place.  He  always  got  his  crops 
in  in  season  and  gathered  in  season.  His 
farm  was  his  kingdom  and  he  wanted  no 


MY     BOYHOOD  IO7 

other.  I  can  see  him  going  about  it,  calling 
the  dog,  "hollering"  at  the  cattle  or  the 
sheep  or  at  the  men  at  work  in  the  fields, 
making  a  great  deal  of  unnecessary  noise, 
but  always  with  an  eye  to  his  crops  and  to 
the  best  interests  of  the  farm.  He  was  a 
home  body,  had  no  desire  to  travel,  little 
curiosity  about  other  lands,  except,  maybe, 
Bible  lands,  and  felt  an  honest  contempt 
for  city  ways  and  city  people.  He  was  as 
unaffected  as  a  child  and  would  ask  a  man 
his  politics  or  a  woman  her  age  as  soon 
as  ask  them  the  time  of  day.  He  had  little  / 
delicacy  of  feeling  on  the  conventional 
side  but  great  tenderness  of  emotion  on 
the  purely  human  side.  His  candour  was  at 
times  appalling,  and  he  often  brought  a 
look  of  shame  into  Mother's  face.  He 
had  received  a  fairly  good  schooling  for 
those  times  and  had  been  a  school  teacher 
himself  in  the  winter  months.  Mother 
was  one  of  his  pupils  when  he  taught  in 
Red  Kill.  I  passed  the  little  school  house 
recently  and  wondered  if  there  was  a  coun- 


IO8  MY     BOYHOOD 

terpart  of  Amy  Kelly  among  the  few  girls 
I  saw  standing  about  the  door,  or  if  there 
was  a  red-haired,  freckled,  country  green 
horn  at  the  teacher's  desk  inside.  Father 
was  but  once  in  New  York,  sometime  in 
the  '2o's,  and  never  saw  the  capitol  of  his 
country  or  his  state.  And  I  am  sure 
he  never  sat  on  a  jury  or  had  a  lawsuit  in 
my  time.  He  took  an  interest  in  politics 
and  was  always  a  Democrat,  and  during 
the  Civil  War,  I  fear,  a  "  copperhead. " 
His  religion  saw  no  evil  in  slavery.  I 
remember  seeing  him  in  some  political  pro 
cession  during  the  Harrison  Campaign  of 
1840.  He  was  with  a  gang  of  men  standing 
up  in  a  wagon  from  the  midst  of  which  rose 
a  pole  with  a  coon  skin  or  a  stuffed  coon 
upon  it.  I  suppose  what  I  saw  was  part 
of  a  Harrison  political  procession. 

Father  "experienced  religion"  in  his  early 
manhood  and  became  a  member  of  the  Old 
School  Baptist  Church.  To  become  mem 
bers  of  that  church  it  was  not  enough  that 
you  wanted  to  lead  a  better  life  and  serve 


MYBOYHOOD  1 09 

God  faithfully;  you  must  have  had  a  certain 
religious  experience,  have  gone  through  a 
crisis  as  Paul  did,  been  convicted  of  sin 
in  some  striking  manner,  and  have  de 
scended  into  the  depths  of  humiliation 
and  despair,  and  then,  when  all  seemed 
lost,  have  heard  the  voice  of  forgiveness 
and  acceptance  and  felt  indeed  that  you 
were  now  a  child  of  God.  This  crucial 
experience  the  candidate  for  church  mem 
bership  was  called  on  to  relate  before  the 
elders  of  the  church,  and  if  the  story  rang 
true,  he  or  she  was  in  due  time  enrolled 
in  the  company  of  the  elect  few.  No 
doubt  about  its  being  a  real  experience 
with  most  of  those  people — a  storm-and- 
stress  period  that  lasted  for  weeks  or  months 
before  the  joy  of  peace  and  forgiveness  came 
to  their  souls.  I  have  heard  some  of  those 
experiences  and  have  read  the  record  of 
many  more  in  The  Signs  of  the  Times, 
which  Father  took  for  more  than  fifty 
years.  The  conversion  was  radical  and 
lasting,  these  men  led  changed  lives  ever 


I  I  O  MY     BOY  HOOD 

after.  With  them  once  a  child  of  GoJ, 
always  a  child  of  God,  reformation  never 
miscarried.  It  was  an  iron-clad  faith  and 
it  stood  the  wear  and  tear  of  life  well. 
Father  was  not  ostentatiously  religious. 
Far  from  it.  I  have  known  him  to  draw  in 
hay  on  Sunday  when  a  shower  threatened, 
and  once  I  saw  him  carry  a  gun  when  the 
pigeons  were  about;  but  he  came  back  game- 
less  with  a  guilty  look  when  he  saw  me, 
and  I  think  he  never  wavered  in  his  Old 
School  Baptist  faith.  There  were  no  reli 
gious  observances  in  the  family  and  no  reli 
gious  instruction.  Father  read  his  hymn 
book  and  his  Bible  and  at  times  his  Signs, 
but  never  compelled  us  to  read  them. 
His  church  did  not  believe  in  Sunday- 
schools  or  in  any  sort  of  religious  training. 
Their  preachers  never  prepared  their  ser 
mons  but  spoke  the  words  that  the  Spirit 
put  into  their  mouths.  As  they  were  mostly 
unlettered  men  the  Spirit  had  many  sins 
of  rhetoric  and  logic  to  answer  for.  Their 
discourses  did  more  credit  to  their  hearts 


MYBOYHOOD  III 

than  to  their  heads.  I  recall  some  of  their 
preachers,  or  Elders,  as  they  were  called, 
very  distinctly — Elder  Jim  Mead;  Elder 
Morrison,  Elder  Hewett,  Elder  Fuller, 
Elder  Hubble — all  farmers  and  unlearned  in 
the  lore  of  this  world,  but  earnest  men  and 
some  of  them  strong,  picturesque  characters. 
Elder  Jim  Mead  usually  went  barefooted 
during  the  summer,  and  Mother  once  told 
me  that  he  often  preached  barefooted  in 
the  school  house.  Elder  Hewett  was  their 
strong  man  during  my  youth — a  narrow 
and  darkened  mind  tried  by  the  wisdom  of 
the  schools,  but  a  man  of  native  force  of 
character  and  often  in  his  preaching  attain 
ing  to  a  strain  of  true  and  lofty  eloquence. 
His  discourses,  if  their  jumble  of  Scriptural 
texts  may  be  called  such,  were  never  a 
call  to  sinners  to  repent  and  be  saved — 
God  would  attend  to  that  Himself — but 
a  vehement  justification  from  the  Scrip 
tures  of  the  Old  School  Baptist  creed,  or 
the  doctrine  of  election  and  justification 
by  faith,  not  by  works.  The  Methodists 


112  MYBOYHOOD 

or  Arminians,  as  he  called  them,  were  a 
thorn  in  his  side  and  he  never  tired  of  hurling 
his  Pauline  texts  at  their  cheap  and  easy 
terms  of  salvation.  Could  he  have  been 
convinced  that  he  must  share  Heaven  with 
the  Arminians,  I  believe  he  would  have 
preferred  to  take  his  chance  in  the  other 
place.  Religious  intolerance  is  an  ugly 
thing,  but  its  days  in  this  world  are  num 
bered,  and  the  day  of  the  Old  School  Bap 
tist  Society  seems  numbered.  Their  church, 
which  was  often  crowded  in  my  youth, 
is  almost  deserted  now.  This  generation 
is  too  light  and  frivolous  for  such  a  heroic 
creed:  the  sons  of  the  old  members  are 
not  men  enough  to  stand  up  under  the 
moral  weight  of  Calvinism  and  predestina 
tion.  Absurd  as  the  doctrine  seems  to  us, 
it  went  with  or  begot  something  in  those 
men  and  women  of  an  earlier  time — a  moral 
fibre  and  depth  of  character — to  which 
the  later  generations  are  strangers.  Of 
course  those  men  were  nearer  the  stump 
than  we  are  and  had  more  of  the  pioneer 


MYBOYHOOD  113 

virtues  and  hardiness  than  we  have,  and 
struggles  and  victory  or  defeat  were  more  a 
part  of  their  lives  than  they  are  of  ours,  a 
hard  creed  with  heroic  terms  of  salvation 
fitted  their  moods  better  than  it  fits  ours. 

My  youthful  faith  in  a  jealous  and  venge 
ful  God,  which  in  some  way  had  been 
instilled  into  my  mind,  was  rudely  shaken 
one  summer  day  during  a  thunderstorm. 
The  idea  had  somehow  got  into  my  head 
that  if  in  any  way  we  mocked  the  powers 
up  above  or  became  disrespectful  toward 
them,  vengeance  would  follow,  quick  and 
sure.  At  a  loud  peal  overhead  the  boy 
I  was  playing  with  deliberately  stuck  up  his 
scornful  lips  at  the  clouds  and  in  other  ways 
expressed  his  defiance.  I  fairly  cringed  in 
my  tracks;  I  expected  to  see  my  compan 
ion  smitten  with  a  thunderbolt  at  my  side. 
That  I  recall  the  incident  so  vividly  shows 
what  a  deep  impression  it  made  upon  me. 
But  I  have  long  ceased  to  think  that  the 
Ruler  of  the  storms  sees  or  cares  whether 
we  make  faces  at  the  clouds  or  not — do 


I  14  MYBOYHOOD 

your  work  well  and  make  all  the  wry  faces 
you  please. 

My  native  mountain,  out  of  whose  loins 
I  sprang,  is  called  the  Old  Clump.  It 
sits  there  with  bare  head  but  mantled 
sides,  looking  southward  and  holding  the 
home  farm  of  three  hundred  and  fifty 
acres  in  its  lap.  The  farm  with  its  check 
ered  fields  lies  there  like  a  huge  apron, 
reaching  up  over  the  smooth  sloping  thighs 
on  the  west  and  on  the  east  and  coming 
well  up  on  the  breast,  forming  the  big 
rough  mountain  fields  where  the  sheep  and 
young  cattle  graze.  Those  mountain  pas 
tures  rarely  knew  the  plough,  but  the  broad 
side-hill  fields,  four  of  them,  that  cover  the 
inside  of  the  western  thigh,  have  been  alter 
nately  ploughed  and  grazed  since  my  boy 
hood  and  before.  They  yield  good  crops  of 
rye,  oats,  buckwheat,  and  potatoes,  and  fair 
summer  grazing.  In  winter  huge  snow 
banks  lie  there  just  below  the  summit 
of  the  hill,  blotting  out  the  stone  fences 
beneath  eight  or  ten  feet  of  snow.  I  have 


MY    BOYHOOD  115 

known  these  banks  to  linger  there  until 
the  middle  of  May.  I  remember  carrying 
a  jug  of  water  one  hot  May  day  to  my 
brother  Curtis  who  was  ploughing  the  upper 
and  steepest  side  hill,  and  whose  plough  had 
nearly  reached  the  edge  of  the  huge  snow 
bank.  Sometimes  the  woodchucks  feel  the 
call  of  spring  in  their  dens  in  the  ground 
beneath  them  and  dig  their  way  out  through 
the  coarse,  granulated  snow,  leaving  muddy 
tracks  where  they  go.  I  have  "carried 
together"  both  oats  and  rye  in  all  these 
fields.  One  September,  during  the  first 
year  of  the  Civil  War,  1862,  we  were  work 
ing  in  the  oats  there  and  Hiram  was  talking 
hourly  of  enlisting  in  the  army  as  a  drummer 
boy.  When  the  cattle  are  grazing  there, 
one  may  often  see  them  from  the  road  over 
the  eastern  leg  of  Old  Clump  which  is  lower, 
silhouetted  against  the  evening  sky.  The 
bleating  of  the  sheep  in  the  still  summer 
twilight  on  the  bosom  of  Old  Clump  is  also 
a  sweet  memory.  So  is  the  evening  song 
of  the  vesper  sparrow,  which  one  may 


Il6  MYBOYHOOD 

hear  all  summer  long  floating  out  from 
these  sweet  pastoral  solitudes.  From  one 
of  these  side-hill  fields,  Father  and  his  hired 
man,  Rube  Dart,  were  once  drawing  oats 
on  a  sled  when  the  load  capsized  while 
Rube  had  his  fork  in  it  on  the  upper  side 
trying  to  hold  it  down,  and  the  fork  with 
Rube  clinging  to  it  described  a  complete 
circle  in  the  air,  Rube  landing  on  his  feet 
below,  none  the  worse  for  his  adventure. 

Grandfather's  farm,  which  he  and  Grand 
mother  carved  out  of  the  wilderness  in 
the  last  years  of  1700  and  where  Father 
was  born  in  1802,  lies  just  over  the  hill 
on  the  western  knee  of  Old  Clump,  and 
is  in  the  watershed  of  West  Settlement,  a 
much  broader  and  deeper  valley  of  nearly 
a  dozen  farms,  and  to  which  my  home  valley 
is  a  tributary.  The  sugar  bush  lies  near 
the  groin  of  the  old  mountain,  the  "beech 
woods"  over  the  eastern  knee,  and  the 
Rundle  Place,  where  now  is  Woodchuck 
Lodge,  is  on  his  skirts  that  look  eastward. 
Hence,  most  of  the  home  farm  stands  apart 


MYBOYHOOD  I  IJ 

in  a  valley  by  itself.  As  you  approach 
on  the  train  from  the  south  you  may  see 
Old  Clump  rising  up  in  the  north  eight  or 
ten  miles  away,  presenting  the  appearance 
of  a  well-defined  cone,  with  the  upper 
portion  of  the  farm  showing,  and  hiding 
behind  it  the  mountain  system  of  which 
it  is  the  southern  end. 

Old  Clump  figured  a  good  deal  in  my 
boyhood  life  and  scarcely  less  in  my  life 
since.  The  first  deer's  horn  I  ever  saw 
we  found  there  one  Sunday  under  a  jutting 
rock  as  we  were  on  our  way  to  the  summit. 
My  excursions  to  salt  and  count  the  sheep 
often  took  me  there,  and  my  boyhood 
thirst  for  the  wild  and  adventurous  took 
me  there  still  oftener.  Old  Clump  used 
to  lift  me  up  into  the  air  three  thousand 
feet  and  introduce  me  to  his  great  brother 
hood  of  mountains  far  and  near,  and  make 
me  acquainted  with  the  full-chested  exhi 
laration  that  awaits  one  on  mountain  tops. 
Graham,  Double  Top,  Slide  Mountain,  Peek 
o'  Moose,  Table  Mountain,  Wittenburg, 


Il8  MYBOYHOOD 

Cornell,  and  others  are  visible  from  the 
summit.  There  was  as  well  something  so 
gentle  and  sweet  and  primitive  about  its 
natural  clearings  and  open  glades,  about 
the  spring  that  bubbled  up  from  under  a 
tilted  rock  just  below  the  summit,  about 
the  grassy  terraces,  its  hidden  ledges, 
its  scattered,  low-branching,  moss-covered 
maples,  the  cloistered  character  of  its 
clumps  of  small  beeches,  its  domestic  look 
ing  mountain  ash,  its  orchard-like  wild 
black  cherries,  its  garden-like  plots  of 
huckleberries,  raspberries,  and  strawberries, 
the  patches  of  fragrant  brakes  like  dense 
miniature  forests  through  which  one  wades 
as  through  patches  of  green  midsummer 
snow,  its  divine  strains  of  the  hermit  thrush 
floating  out  of  the  wooded  depths  below 
you — all  these  things  drew  me  as  a  boy 
and  still  draw  me  as  an  old  man. 

From  where  the  road  crosses  the  eastern 
knee  of  Old  Clump  to  where  it  crosses  the 
western  knee  is  over  half  a  mile.  Well 
down  in  the  valley  between  them  the  home 


MY     BOYHOOD  I  19 

buildings  are  situated,  and  below  them  the 
old  and  very  productive  meadows,  only 
the  upper  borders  of  which  have  ever  known 
the  plough.  The  little  brooklet  that  drains 
the  valley  used  to  abound  in  trout,  but  in 
sixty  years  it  has  dwindled  to  such  an  ex 
tent  and  has  been  so  nearly  obliterated  by 
grazing  cattle  that  there  are  no  trout  until 
you  reach  the  hemlocks  on  the  threshold 
of  which  my  fishing  excursions  of  boyhood 
used  to  end.  The  woods  were  too  dark 
and  mysterious  for  my  inflamed  imagination 
— inflamed,  I  suppose,  by  Grandfather's 
spook  stories.  In  this  little  stream  in  the 
pasture  I  used  to  build  ponds,  the  ruins 
of  one  of  which  are  still  visible.  In  this 
pond  I  learned  to  swim,  but  none  of  my 
brothers  would  venture  in  with  me.  I  was 
the  only  one  in  the  family  who  ever  mastered 
the  art  of  swimming  and  I  mastered  it  by 
persistent  paddling  in  this  pond  on  Sundays 
and  summer  evenings  and  between  my  farm 
duties  at  other  times.  All  my  people  were 
"landlubbers"  of  the  most  pronounced 


I2O  MYBOYHOOD 

type  and  afraid  to  get  above  their  knees  in 
the  water  or  to  trust  themselves  to  row- 
boats  or  other  craft.  Here  again  I  was  an 
odd  one. 

I  used  to  make  kites  and  crossbows  and 
darts  and  puzzle  people  with  the  trick  of 
the  buncombe  blocks.  One  summer  I  made 
a  very  large  kite,  larger  than  any  I  had  ever 
seen,  and  attaching  a  string  fully  half  a 
mile  long  sent  it  up  with  a  meadow  mouse 
tethered  to  the  middle  of  the  frame.  I 
suppose  I  wanted  to  give  this  little  creature 
of  the  dark  and  hidden  ways  of  the  meadow 
— so  scared  of  its  life  from  hawks,  foxes, 
and  cats,  that  it  rarely  shows  itself  out  of 
its  secret  tunnels  in  the  meadow  bottoms 
or  its  retreats  under  the  flat  stones  in  the 
pastures — a  taste  of  sky  and  sunshine  and 
a  glimpse  of  the  big  world  in  which  it  lived. 
He  came  down  winking  and  blinking  but 
he  appeared  none  the  worse  for  his  trip 
skyward,  and  I  let  him  go  to  relate  his 
wonderful  adventure  to  his  fellows. 

Once  I  made  a  miniature  sawmill  by  the 


MYBOYHOOD  121 

roadside  on  the  overflow  of  water  from  the 
house  spring  that  used  to  cause  people  pass 
ing  by  to  stop  and  laugh.  It  had  a  dam, 
a  flume,  an  overshot  wheel  ten  inches  in 
diameter,  a  carriage  for  the  log  (a  green 
cucumber),  a  gate  for  the  tin  saw  about  six 
inches  long,  and  a  superstructure  less  than 
two  feet  high.  The  water  reached  the  wheel 
through  a  piece  of  old  pump  log  three  or 
four  feet  long,  capped  with  the  body  of  an 
old  tin  dinner  horn.  Set  at  quite  an  angle, 
the  water  issued  from  the  half-inch  opening 
in  the  end  of  the  horn  with  force  enough 
to  make  the  little  wheel  hum  and  send  the 
saw  through  the  cucumber  at  a  rapid  rate 
— only  I  had  to  shove  the  carriage  along 
by  hand.  Brother  Hiram  helped  me  with 
the  installation  of  this  plant.  It  was  my 
plaything  for  only  one  season. 

I  made  a  cross-gun  that  had  a  barrel 
(in  the  end  of  which  you  dropped  the  arrow) 
and  a  lock  with  a  trigger,  and  that  was  really 
a  spiteful,  dangerous  weapon.  About  my 
fifteenth  year  I  had  a  real  gun,  a  small, 


122  MYBOYHOOD 

double-barrelled  gun  made  by  some  ingeni 
ous  blacksmith,  I  fancy.  But  it  had  fairly 
good  shooting  qualities — several  times  I 
brought  down  wild  pigeons  from  the  tree 
tops  with  it.  Rabbits,  gray  squirrels,  par 
tridges,  also  fell  before  it.  I  bought  it  of 
a  pedlar  for  three  dollars,  paying  on  the 
instalment  plan,  with  money  made  out 
of  maple  sugar. 

On  the  wooded  west  side  of  Old  Clump 
we  used  to  hunt  rabbits — really  the  northern 
hare,  brown  in  summer  and  white  in  winter. 
Their  runways  made  paths  among  the 
mountain-maple  bushes  just  below  the 
summit.  On  the  eastern  side  was  a 
more  likely  place  for  gray  squirrels,  coons, 
and  partridges.  Foxes  were  at  home  on 
all  sides  and  Old  Clump  was  a  favourite 
ground  of  the  fox  hunters.  One  day  of 
early  Indian  summer,  as  we  were  digging 
potatoes  on  the  lower  side  hill,  our  attention 
was  attracted  by  someone  calling  from  the 
edge  of  the  woods  at  the  upper  side  of  the 
sheep  lot.  My  brothers  rested  on  their 


MY     BOYHOOD  123 

hoe  handles  a  moment  and  I  brushed  the 
soil  from  my  hands  and  straightened  up 
from  my  bent  attitude  of  picking  up  the 
potatoes.  We  all  listened  and  looked.  Pres 
ently  we  made  out  the  figure  of  a  man 
up  by  the  edge  of  the  woods  and  soon 
decided  from  his  excited  voice  and  gestures 
that  he  was  calling  for  help.  Finally, 
we  made  out  that  someone  was  hurt  and 
the  oxen  and  sled  were  needed  to  bring  him 
down.  It  turned  out  to  be  a  neighbour, 
Gould  Bouton,  calling,  and  Elihu  Meeker, 
his  uncle,  who  was  hurt.  They  were  fox 
hunting  and  Elihu  had  fired  at  the  fox 
from  the  top  of  a  high  rock  near  the  top 
of  Old  Clump  and  in  his  excitement  had  in 
some  way  slipped  from  the  rock  and  fallen 
on  the  stones  fifteen  or  twenty  feet  below 
and  sustained  serious  injury  to  his  side 
and  back.  With  all  possible  speed  the  oxen 
and  sled  were  got  up  there  and  after  long 
waiting  they  returned  to  the  house  with 
Elihu  aboard,  groaning  and  writhing  on  a 
heap  of  straw.  The  injury  had  caused  him 


1 24  MYBOYHOOD 

to  bleed  from  his  kidneys.  In  the  mean 
time  Doctor  Newkirk  had  been  sent  for  and 
I  remember  that  I  feared  Elihu  would  die 
before  he  got  there.  What  a  relief  I  felt 
when  I  saw  the  doctor  coming  on  horseback, 
in  the  good  old  style,  running  his  horse 
at  the  top  of  his  speed!  "Now,"  I  said, 
"Elihu  will  be  saved."  He  had  already 
lost  a  good  deal  of  blood,  but  the  first  thing 
the  doctor  did  was  to  take  more  from  him. 
This  was  in  times  when  bleeding  was  about 
the  first  thing  a  doctor  did  on  all  occasions. 
The  idea  seemed  to  be  that  you  could  sap 
the  strength  of  the  disease  by  that  means 
without  sapping  the  strength  of  the  man. 
Well,  the  old  hunter  survived  the  double 
blood-letting;  he  was  cured  of  his  injury 
and  cujred  of  his  fox-hunting  fever  also. 

He  was  a  faithful,  hard-working  man,  a 
carpenter  by  trade.  He  built  our  "new 
barn"  in  1844  and  put  a  new  roof  on  the 
old  barn.  Father  got  out  the  timber 
for  the  new  barn  in  old  Jonas  More's  hem 
locks  and  hauled  it  to  the  sawmill.  Lanson 


MYBOYHOOD  125 

Davids  worked  with  him.  They  had  their 
dinner  in  the  winter  woods.  One  day  they 
had  a  pork  stew  and  Father  said  he  had 
never  eaten  anything  in  his  life  that  tasted 
so  good.  He  and  Mother  were  then  in  the 
flower  of  their  days  and  Lanson  Davids 
said  to  him  on  this  occasion:  "Chauncey, 
you  are  the  biggest  hog  to  eat  I  ever  saw 
in  my  life/'  "  I  was  hungry/'  said  Father. 

We  had  "raisings"  in  those  days,  when 
a  new  building  was  put  up.  The  timbers 
were  heavy,  often  hewn  from  trees  in  the 
woods,  set  up,  pinned  together  in  what  were 
called  "bents."  In  a  farmer's  barn  there 
were  usually  four  bents,  tied  together  by 
the  "plates"  and  cross  beams.  I  remember 
well  the  early  summer  day  when  the  new 
barn  was  raised.  I  can  see  Elihu  guiding 
the  corner  post  of  the  first  bent  and  when 
the  men  were  ready  calling  out:  "All  together 
now,"  "set  her  up,"  "heave'o  heave,  heave 
'o  heave,"  till  the  bent  was  in  position. 

One  June  when  he  was  shingling  the  old 
barn  he  engaged  me  to  pick  him  some  wild 


1 26  MYBOYHOOD 

strawberries.  When  I  came  in  the  after 
noon  with  my  four-quart  pail  nearly  full 
he  came  down  off  the  roof  and  gave  me  a 
silver  quarter,  or  two  shillings,  as  then 
called,  and  I  felt  very  rich. 

It  is  an  open  country,  like  an  unrolled 
map,  simple  in  all  its  lines,  with  little  vari 
ety  in  its  scenery,  devoid  of  sharp  contrasts 
and  sudden  changes  and  hence  lacking  in 
the  element  of  the  picturesque  which  comes 
from  these  things.  It  is  a  part  of  the  earth's 
surface  that  has  never  been  subject  to  con 
vulsion  and  upheaval.  The  stratified  rock 
lies  horizontally  just  as  it  was  laid  down  in 
the  bottom  of  the  Devonian  Seas  millions 
of  years  ago.  The  mountains  and  the 
valleys  are  the  result  of  vast  ages  of  gentle 
erosion,  and  gentleness  and  repose  are 
stamped  upon  every  featureof  the  landscape. 
The  hand  of  time  and  the  slow  but  enormous 
pressure  of  the  great  continental  ice  sheet 
have  rubbed  down  and  smoothed  off  all 
sharp  angles,  giving  to  the  mountains 
their  long  sweeping  lines,  to  the  hills  their 


MY     BOYHOOD  127 

broad  round  backs,  and  to  the  valleys  their 
deep,  smooth,  trough-like  contours.  The 
level  strata  crop  out  here  and  there, 
giving  to  the  hills  the  effect  of  heavy  eye 
brows.  But  occasionally  it  is  more  than 
that:  in  the  mountains  it  is  often  like  a 
cavernous  mouth  into  which  one  can  retreat 
several  yards,  where  the  imaginative  farm 
boy  loves  to  prowl  and  linger  like  the  half 
savage  that  he  is  and  dream  of  Indians 
and  the  wild,  adventurous  life.  There 
were  a  few  such  cavernous  ledges  in  the 
woods  on  my  father's  farm  where  one 
could  retreat  from  a  sudden  shower,  but 
less  than  a  mile  away  there  were  two  lines 
of  them,  one  on  Pine  Hill  and  one  on  Chase's 
Hill,  where  the  foundations  of  the  earth 
were  laid  open,  presenting  a  broken  and 
jagged  rocky  front  from  ten  to  thirty  or 
forty  feet  high,  gnawed  full  of  little  niches 
and  pockets  and  cavernous  recesses  by 
the  never-dulled  tooth  of  geologic  time  and 
affording  dens  and  retreats  where  Indians 
and  wild  beasts  often  took  refuge.  As 


1 28  MYBOYHOOD 

a  boy  how  I  used  to  haunt  these  places, 
especially  on  Sunday  when  young  winter- 
green  and  black  birch  gave  us  an  excuse 
to  go  to  the  woods.  What  an  eternity  of 
time  was  written  in  the  faces  of  those  rocks ! 
What  world-old  forces  had  left  their  marks 
there! — in  the  lines,  in  the  colours,  in  the 
huge  dislocations  and  look  of  impending 
downfall  of  many  of  them,  yet  with  a  look 
of  calm  and  unconquerable  age  that  can 
be  felt  only  in  the  presence  of  such  survivals 
of  the  primaeval.  I  want  no  better  pastime 
now,  far  from  my  boyhood  as  I  am,  than 
to  spend  part  of  a  summer  or  autumn  day 
amid  these  rocks.  One  passes  from  the 
sunny  fields,  where  the  cattle  are  grazing 
or  the  plough  is  turning  the  red  furrow,  into 
these  gray,  time-sculptured,  monumental 
ruins,  where  the  foundations  of  the  everlast 
ing  hills  are  crumbling,  and  yet  where  the 
silence  and  the  repose  are  like  that  of  si 
dereal  space.  How  relative  everything  is! 
The  hills  and  the  mountains  grow  old  and 
pass  away  in  geologic  time  as  invariably  as 


MYBOYHOOD  1 29 

the  snow  bank  in  spring,  and  yet  in  our  little 
span  of  life  they  are  the  types  of  the  per 
manent  and  unchanging. 

The  phoebe  bird  loves  to  build  its  mossy 
nest  in  these  shelving  ledges,  and  once  I 
found  that  one  of  our  native  mice,  maybe 
the  jumping  mouse,  had  apparently  taken 
a  hint  from  her  and  built  a  nest  of  thistle 
down  covered  with  moss  on  a  little  shelf 
three  or  four  feet  above  the  ground.  Coons 
and  woodchucks  often  have  their  dens  in 
these  ledges,  and  before  the  country  was 
settled  no  doubt  bears  did  also.  In  one 
place,  under  a  huge  ledge  that  projects 
twelve  or  fifteen  feet,  there  is  a  spring  to 
which  cattle  come  from  the  near  fields  to 
drink.  The  old  earth  builders  used  material 
of  very  unequal  hardness  and  durability 
when  they  built  these  hills,  their  contracts 
were  not  well  supervised,  and  the  result 
has  been  that  the  more  rapid  decay  of  the 
softer  material  has  undermined  the  harder 
layers  and  led  to  their  downfall.  Every 
fifty  or  a  hundred  or  two  hundred  feet  in 


130  MYBOYHOOD 

the  Catskill  formation  the  old  contractors 
slipped  in  a  layer  of  soft,  slatey,  red  sand 
stone  which  introduces  an  element  of  weak 
ness  and  that  we  everywhere  see  the  effects 
of.  One  effect  of  this  weakness  has  an 
element  of  beauty.  I  refer  to  the  beautiful 
waterfalls  that  are  sparsely  scattered  over 
this  region,  made  possible,  as  nearly  every 
where  else,  by  the  harder  strata  holding 
out  after  the  softer  ones  beneath  have 
eroded  away,  thus  keeping  the  face  of  the 
falls  nearly  vertical. 

The  Catskill  region  is  abundantly  sup 
plied  with  springs  that  yield  the  best  water 
in  the  world.  My  father's  farm  had  a 
spring  in  nearly  every  field,  each  one  with 
a  character  of  its  own.  What  associations 
linger  about  each  one  of  them!  How 
eagerly  we  found  our  way  to  them  in  the 
hot  haying  and  harvesting  days ! — the  small, 
cold,  never-changing  spring  in  the  barn- 
hill  meadow  under  the  beech  tree,  upon 
whose  now  decayed  bowl  half-obliterated 
initials  of  farm  boys  and  hired  men  of 


MYBOYHOOD  131 

thirty,  fifty,  and  nearly  seventy  years  ago 
may  still  be  seen;  the  spring  in  the  old 
meadow  near  the  barn  where  the  cattle 
used  to  drink  in  winter  and  where,  with 
the  haymakers,  I  used  to  drink  so  eagerly 
in  summer;  the  copious  spring  in  the  bank 
at  the  foot  of  the  old  orchard  which,  in 
the  severe  drouths  of  recent  years,  holds 
out  when  other  springs  fail;  the  tiny  but 
perennial  spring  issuing  from  under  the 
huge  tilted  rock  in  the  sumac  field  where 
the  young  cattle  and  the  sheep  of  the 
mountain  pasture  drink  and  where  we  have 
all  refreshed  ourselves  so  many  times; 
the  spring  from  under  a  rocky  eyebrow  on 
the  big  side  hill  which  is  now  piped  to  the 
house  and  which  in  my  boyhood  was 
brought  in  pine  or  hemlock  "pump  logs," 
and  to  which  I  have  been  sent  so  many  times 
to  clean  the  leaves  off  the  tin  strainer — 
what  associations  have  we  all  of  us  with 
that  spring!  For  over  eighty  years  it  has 
supplied  the  family  with  water,  and  not  till 
the  severe  drouths  of  later  years  did  it  fail. 


132  MYBOYHOOD 

The  old  beech  tree  that  stands  above  it  is 
one  of  the  landmarks  of  the  farm.  Once 
when  a  boy  I  saw  a  flock  of  wild  pigeons 
disappear  in  its  leafy  interior,  and  then 
saw  Abe  Meeker,  who  worked  for  Father 
in  1840,  shoot  into  it  from  the  stone  wall, 
six  or  seven  rods  below,  and  bring  down  four 
birds  which  he  could  not  see  when  he  fired. 
Three  of  them  fell  dead  and  one  fell  at 
his  feet  behind  the  stone  wall.  But  I 
need  not  call  the  roll  of  all  the  fountains 
of  my  youth  on  the  home  farm — fountains 
of  youth  indeed!  and  fountain  of  grateful 
memories  in  my  later  years.  I  never  pass 
any  of  them  now  but  my  footsteps  linger 
by  them  and  I  clean  them  out  if  they  are 
clogged  and  neglected  and  feel  that  here  is  a 
friend  of  other  days  whose  face  is  as  bright 
and  youthful  as  ever. 


MY  FATHER 

BY 

JULIAN  BURROUGHS 


MY  FATHER 

BY 

JULIAN  BURROUGHS 

THE  earliest  recollection  that  I  have 
of  Father  was  of  one  spring  day 
when  he  was  chasing  and  stoning 
the  cat,  our  pet  cat,  who  had  caught  a 
bluebird.  I  remember  the  fierce  look  in 
the  cat's  eyes,  and  her  nose  flattened  over 
the  back  of  blue,  her  nervously  twitch 
ing  tail,  and  the  speed  and  strength  with 
which  Father  pursued  her,  and  the  lan 
guage  he  used,  language  that  impressed 
me,  at  least,  if  not  the  cat,  and  which  dis 
credited  the  cat  and  her  ancestry  as  well. 
As  I  remember  it  we  rescued  the  bluebird, 
and  there  the  picture  fades.  Just  how 
Father  himself  looked  then  I  do  not  know; 
doubtless,  childlike,  I  accepted  him  as  a 
matter  of  course,  along  with  all  the  other 
135 


136  MYFATHER 

interesting  things  in  this  world  in  which 
I  was  finding  myself.  Again  I  remember 
riding  on  his  shoulder  in  the  downstairs 
hall,  as  he  skipped  about  with  me,  and  of 
being  face  to  face,  on  equal  terms,  with 
the  hall  lamp,  and  of  telling  Father  that 
when  I  grew  up  I  was  going  to  be  a  king, 
and  of  Father  telling  me  at  once  that  they 
hung  kings  on  a  sour-apple  tree.  It  was 
always  a  sour-apple  tree,  never  a  sweet  one, 
used  for  hangings.  So  I  was  glad  to  relin 
quish  the  idea  of  being  a  king  and  to  become 
instead  a  'Tinder-out  of  things."  How 
Father  did  laugh  at  that!  He  had  been 
telling  me  something  of  his  readings  in 
astronomy  and  the  sciences,  just  at  that 
time  coming  into  their  own,  and  I  was  so 
impressed  and  fired  with  emulation  that  I, 
too,  declared  for  wanting  to  be  "a  finder- 
out  of  things,"  and  Father  would  repeat  it 
and  laugh  heartily.  It  is  a  joy  to  think 
of  him  as  he  was  then,  virile  in  body,  full 
fleshed,  active,  leading  in  walking  and 
skating  and  swimming — what  a  flood  of 


MYFATHER  137 

memories!  What  an  interest  he  took  in 
all  the  things  I  did,  and  how  often  a  most 
active  part.  One  day  in  May  I  had  gone 
out  with  our  one  shot  of  shad  net,  and  was 
to  try  an  experiment.  I  had  told  Father 
that  I  would  row  a  ways  up  the  river  and 
throw  out  the  net  and  then  row  on  up  to 
the  mouth  of  Black  Creek  and  fish  for  perch, 
and  when  the  tide  turned  would  row  out  and 
take  up  the  net,  which  would  catch  the  flood 
slack  not  far  above.  What  he  thought  1 
do  not  know,  for  he  went  to  Dick  Martin, 
an  experienced  shad  fisherman,  and  told 
him  what  I  was  going  to  do.  Dick  hastened 
to  tell  him,  in  alarm,  that  what  I  intended 
was  impossible,  that  there  was  a  row  of 
old  stakes  out  from  the  black  barn  just 
below  the  mouth  of  Black  Creek  and  that 
my  net  would  get  fast  on  these  and  I  would 
lose  it,  and  perhaps  come  to  harm  besides. 
So  Father  walked  the  two  miles,  hurrying 
up  along  the  steep  and  rocky  shore,  and 
found  me  just  coming  out  from  the  creek. 
He  told  me  what  Dick  had  said  and  got 


138  MYFATHER 

into  the  boat  and  we  rowed  out  to  the  net, 
which  was  acting  very  queerly. 

!<  You're  fast  now,  boy,  it's  just  as  Dick 
said/'  he  exclaimed  as  I  rowed  as  hard  as 
I  could  for  the  long  line  of  buoys.  Never 
can  I  forget  the  hour  of  alarm  and  distress, 
for  me,  that  followed.  The  tide  turned 
and  the  loitering  flood  gave  way  to  the 
sweeping  ebb,  the  dark  water  from  the 
creek  came  rushing  down  on  us,  the  buoys 
swirled  and  twisted  in  the  running  water 
and  began  to  disappear  one  by  one.  We 
quickly  got  hold  of  the  end  and  I  picked 
up  as  much  as  I  could;  then  Father  got  hold 
and  tried  to  pull  the  net  loose.  He  pulled 
and  pulled  until  he  literally  pulled  the  stern 
of  the  skiff  under  water. 

"You'll  have  to  cut  the  net,  it  is  the  only 
way,"  he  said  finally,  red-faced  and  panting, 
so  we  did  cut  the  net,  leaving  a  middle 
section  there  on  the  old  stake  in  the  bottom 
of  the  river.  There  is  no  denying  that  it 
was  thoughtful  of  him  to  come,  and  that  he 
had  my  safety  and  welfare  at  heart.  Though 


MY     FAT  HER  I  39 

I  was  always  cautious  and  wise  to  the  way 
of  the  river,  something  might  have  happened 
and  my  bones  might  be  there  beside  the  old 
stake — and  what  a  lot  I  would  have  missed! 
— or  as  Father  once  so  aptly  expressed  it: 
"I'm  not  afraid  to  die,  but  I  enjoy  so  much 
living!" 

He  was  always  cautioning  me,  and  worry 
ing  about  me  when  I  was  out  on  the  river, 
especially  at  night,  and  yet  he  took  chances 
that  I  would  not  take.  In  the  early  days 
here  at  Riverby  there  was  no  railroad  on 
this  side  of  the  Hudson,  and  to  get  a  train 
one  must  cross  the  river.  In  summer  one 
hung  out  a  white  flag  from  West  Park 
dock  and  Bilyou  would  row  over  for  you, 
but  when  there  was  ice  in  the  river  one  must 
walk  or  stay  home.  In  zero  weather  it 
was  only  a  matter  of  a  long  walk  over  the 
ice,  often  facing  a  blast  of  below-zero  wind, 
but  when  the  March  thaws  had  begun  one 
took  one's  life  very  lightly  to  venture  on 
the  ice.  The  thawing  water  cut  away  the 
ice  from  underneath,  leaving  no  mark  on 


I4O  MYFATHER 

the  surface,  weakening  it  in  spots,  and  il 
one  went  through,  the  tide  swept  him  under 
the  ice,  where  the  water  was  at  least  cold 
enough  to  chill  one  and  make  death  easy. 
On  such  a  day  Father  crossed  the  river  on 
a  crack,  for,  strange  to  say,  one  of  the  big 
cracks  that  always  come  in  the  ice  had 
pushed  or  folded  down,  and  not  up,  and  the 
water  had  frozen  over,  making  a  streak  of 
triple-thick  ice,  and  on  this  streak  he 
crossed  the  Hudson,  the  ice  so  far  gone  from 
the  sun,  so  honeycombed  and  rotten,  that 
he  could  stick  his  cane  through  on  either 
side  of  his  crack!  Another  time  he  was 
crossing  in  early  April  with  his  dog,  and 
when  in  the  middle  of  the  river,  which  is 
a  full  half  mile  wide  at  Riverby,  busy 
with  his  thoughts,  he  suddenly  saw  his  dog 
running  for  the  shore,  which  apparently 
was  moving  away  rapidly  toward  New 
York!  But  the  shores  were  standing  eter 
nally  still;  the  ice  it  was  that  moved,  and 
was  moving  up  with  the  flood  tide,  moving 
just  the  width  of  a  big  canal  that  the  ice 


MY    PATH  E  R  141 

harvesters  had  cut  above.  When  the  tide 
turned,  about  an  hour  later,  all  the  ice  went 
out  of  the  river. 

When  first  Father  saw  some  smokeless 
powder  he  was  surprised  at  its  appearance, 
and  would  not  believe  it  was  powder,  until 
he  threw  some  on  the  hot  stove.  I  used 
it  in  our  old  shotgun  and  he  was  much 
alarmed,  yet  he  told  me  that  in  his  hunt 
for  Thomas's  Lake,  of  which  he  speaks  in 
"Wake  Robin/'  he  loaded  his  little  muzzle- 
loading  gun  with  an  entire  handful  of 
powder  and  then,  for  he  felt  it  would  burst, 
he  held  it  at  arm's  length  over  his  head 
to  fire.  This  he  did  time  after  time,  in 
his  attempt  to  signal  to  his  companions. 
The  little  gun  survived  the  ordeal  and 
hangs  now  in  the  gun  room.  With  it  is 
the  little  cane  gun,  a  small  shotgun  that 
looked  exactly  like  a  cane,  but  which  was 
quite  effective  for  small  birds,  and  which 
he  used  when  making  collections  of  birds 
about  Washington.  Strangely  enough  for 
those  days,  it  was  against  the  law  to  shoot 


142  MY    FATHER 

birds,  and  mounted  guards  enforced  this 
law.  Father  would  tell  with  glee  how  he 
would  shoot  a  bird  he  wanted  for  his  collec 
tion,  and  in  a  moment  the  guard  would 
come  rushing  up,  asking  who  fired  the  shot, 
and  Father  would  tell  him  it  was  just  over 
the  rise  of  ground,  or  behind  those  trees, 
or  something,  and  off  would  hurry  the  guard 
while  Father  picked  up  his  bird  and  reloaded 
his  cane.  It  seems  queer  to  us  now  to 
think  of  John  Burroughs  as  shooting  and 
mounting  song  birds,  making  collections 
to  be  set  up  on  a  tree  behind  glass,  but 
he  did,  for  in  those  days  they  were  quite 
the  proper  thing,  cases  of  them,  fitting 
enough  for  museums,  often  being  seen  in 
private  homes.  I  can  remember  taking 
lessons  in  taxidermy  from  Father,  and  of 
skinning  and  mounting  wildfowl,  and  to 
day  there  are  a  loon  and  a  prairie  chicken 
here  in  the  house  at  Riverby  that  he 
mounted  in  those  early  years.  The  col 
lections  of  birds  he  made  are  scattered  far 
and  wide  or  were  destroyed  long  ago.  All 


MYFATHER  143 

of  them  were  shot  with  the  little  muzzle- 
loading  cane  gun  or  with  a  little  muzzle- 
loading  fowling  piece:  those  were  the  days 
of  the  ramrod  and  wasps'  or  hornets' 
nests  gathered  and  used  for  wadding,  and 
the  superstition,  which  Father  often  ex 
pressed,  that  if  you  spilled  or  dropped  a 
shot  in  loading,  it  was  your  game  shot,  the 
one  that  would  have  killed  and  without 
which  the  shot  would  miss.  I  can  see  the 
fascinating-looking  black  powder  now,  scin 
tillating  as  Father  poured  it  from  the  palm 
of  his  short  brown  hand  into  the  muzzle  of 
the  gun. 

There  was  one  quality  which  Father 
possessed  to  a  marked  degree  and  which 
I  always  envied  him,  a  thing  small  in  itself, 
yet  which  enabled  him  to  accomplish  what 
he  did  in  literature,  and  that  was  the 
ability  to  lay  aside  the  business  or  cares 
of  life,  as  one  would  hang  up  one's  hat, 
absolutely  and  completely,  and  turn  to 
his  writing.  The  world  will  think  of  him 
as  a  poet  naturalist,  as  a  gentle  sage  and 


144  MYFATHER 

philosopher,  when  he  was  in  truth  a  literary 
craftsman,  and  one  who  could  never  give 
but  a  portion  of  his  time  and  effort  to  his 
life's  work  until  he  was  sixty  years  of  age. 
I  first  remember  him  as  a  bank  examiner. 
I  remember  his  going  away  for  trips  to 
examine  banks,  of  his  packing  his  valise 
and  putting  on  a  white  or  "boiled"  shirt,  the 
gold  cufT  buttons,  his  combing  his  beard, 
the  wonder  and  mystery  of  it  all.  Then 
he  became  a  "mugwump"  and  the  new 
party  gave  his  bank-examining  to  some 
one  else,  and,  as  he  expressed  it,  "  I  had  to 
stir  my  stumps,"  and  he  took  up  the  raising 
of  fine  grapes. 

Just  as  his  boyhood  had  the  cow  for  its 
centre  of  interest,  mine  had  the  Delaware 
grape.  And  Father  made  a  success  of  his 
vineyards.  I  can  see  him  now  summer 
pruning,  he  on  one  side  of  the  row,  I  on  the 
other,  "pulling  down"  as  we  called  the 
summer  pruning,  or  he  was  stamping  lids 
or  tying  up  bundles  of  baskets.  Many 
of  the  lids  had  sawdust  on  them  which  had 


MYFATHER  145 

to  be  blown  or  brushed  off  before  they 
could  be  stamped.  Father  acquired  the 
habit  of  blowing,  and  he  got  so  used  to  it 
that  he  would  blow  anyway,  whether  or 
not  the  lid  needed  it;  if  it  did  not  he  would 
blow  straight  ahead  and  I  would  laugh  at 
him  for  it,  and  he  would  raise  his  eyebrows 
and  half  smile,  meaning,  that  it  was  some 
thing  he  could  indulge  himself  in.  (He 
once  wrote  of  his  grandson : 

I  had  the  rare  good  fortune  to  be  born  in  the 
country  upon  a  farm  and  to  share  in  the  duties 
and  responsibilities  of  farm  life.  My  poor  grandson 
John  is  not  so  lucky  in  this  respect  and  he  has  not 
had  to  pick  up  potatoes  and  stone  and  gather  apples 
and  husk  corn  and  hoe  corn  and  spread  and  rake 
hay  and  drive  the  cows  and  hunt  up  the  sheep  in 
the  mountain  and  spread  manure  and  weed  the 
garden  and  clean  the  cow  stables,  and  so  on,  and 
go  two  miles  through  snow-choked  fields  and  woods 
to  school  in  winter  and  have  few  books  to  read  and 
see  no  illustrated  papers  or  magazines.  John 
has  the  movies  by  night  and  his  bicycle  by  day  and 
a  graded  school  to  attend  and  a  hundred  aids  and 
spurs  where  I  had  none.  My  fate  was  better  than 
John's  and  I  can  but  hope  he  has  advantages  that 
I  did  not  have  that  may  offset  the  advantages  1  had. 


1 46  MYFATHER 

In  this  case  I  know  that  time  and  distance 
fend  enchantment,  for  of  the  hard  work 
in  the  vineyards  Father  did  very  little — 
the  cultivating  with  a  horse  on  days  so 
hot  that  the  horse  was  covered  with  lather 
and  the  dust  rose  in  a  cloud  over  one's 
perspiration-soaked  clothes,  the  days  follow 
ing  the  spray  cart  with  the  lime  and  blue 
vitriol  flying  in  one's  face  and  running  down 
one's  legs,  the  tying  in  March  and  early 
April  until  one's  fingers  were  raw  and  one's 
neck  ached  from  reaching  up — of  all  these 
and  other  tasks  he  knew  nothing.  Often 
he  said  of  himself  that  he  was  lazy;  and, 
though  what  he  accomplished  in  his  life 
stands  like  a  monument  in  one  sense  of 
the  word,  he  was  lazy.  Routine  work, 
a  daily  grind  at  tasks  for  which  he  had  no 
liking,  would  have  shortened  his  days  and 
perhaps  even  embittered  him.  Yet  with 
what  eagerness  he  went  at  his  writing! 
For  sixty  years  and  over  he  found  his  great 
est  joy  in  his  craft — as  he  once  wrote  me, 
"There  is  no  joy  like  it,  when  sap  runs 


MYFATHER  147 

there  is  no  fun  like  writing."  As  he 
said  of  his  books  in  a  preface  to  a  new  edi 
tion,  "Very  little  real  'work'  has  gone  into 
them."  One  day  out  at  La  Jolla,  California, 
up  on  the  hillside  overlooking  the  blue 
Pacific  there  was  a  gathering  in  one  of  the 
biological  laboratories  and  the  school  chil 
dren  came  trooping  in.  Father  was  asked 
to  talk  to  them  and  among  other  things  he 
asked  them  if  a  bee  got  honey  from  the 
flowers.  "  No,"  he  said,  "the  bee  gets  nectar 
from  the  flower,  a  thin  sweetish  liquid 
which  the  bee,  by  processes  in  its  own  body, 
turns  into  honey."  I  have  always  suspected 
that  Father  liked  to  think  of  himself  as  a 
bee,  out  in  the  sunshine  and  warmth,  in 
the  fields  and  woods,  among  the  flowers, 
gathering  delightful  impressions  of  it  all 
which  with  his  handicraft  he  could  preserve 
in  an  imperishable  form  that  others  might 
also  enjoy.  And  does  a  bee  really  work? 
Is  it  not  doing  exactly  what  it  enjoys  or 
wants  to  do?  Does  it  have  to  make  any 
conscious  effort  to  fare  forth  among  the 


148  MY    FATHER 

flowers?  Does  it  have  to  keep  on  doing 
what  it  dislikes  to  do  long  after  it  is  tired 
out?  So  whether  the  life  of  John  Bur 
roughs  was  one  long  life  of  happiness  and 
lazy  play,  or  whether  it  was  one  of  hard 
work,  depends,  like  so  many  other  things,  on 
the  point  of  view.  I  like  to  think  of  his 
long  and  happy  life  as  one  in  which  he 
turned  all  work  to  play,  and  in  so  doing  he 
accomplished  mightily. 

Often  Father  tried  to  account  for  himself, 
how  he  happened  to  break  away  from  the 
life  of  his  family  and  early  environment  so 
absolutely  and  completely  and  become,  not 
a  weak,  easy-going,  though  picturesque 
farmer  in  the  farther  Catskills,  but  a  man 
of  letters,  a  unique  and  picturesque  literary 
craftsman.  "I  had  it  in  my  blood,  I 
guess/'  he  once  said.  With  it  he  had  what 
most  of  us  have,  the  love  of  the  woods  and 
fields  and  the  hunting  and  fishing.  Trout 
fishing,  the  most  delightful  of  all,  had  for 
him  a  perennial  charm,  and  bee-hunting, 
too,  and  camping  out,  exploring  new  streams 


MY    FATHER  149 

and  woods.  All  this  was  fostered  and 
developed  by  his  farm  life  and  early  associa 
tions,  and  then  when  he  became  vault 
keeper  in  the  Treasury  Department  in 
Washington  he  was  shut  up  away  from  it 
all  with  nothing  to  do  but  look  at  the  steel 
doors.  Almost  without  being  able  to  do 
otherwise  he  began  to  live  over  again  the 
delightful  days  he  had  spent  afield  by  writ 
ing  of  them.  He  was  like  an  exile  dreaming 
of  his  native  land.  Nature  has  a  trick  of 
casting  a  spell  over  those  who  spend  their 
days  with  her  so  that  when  the  day  is  gone 
only  the  memories  of  the  delights  of  it  re 
main  and  these  become  ever  more  beautiful 
and  highly  coloured  with  time.  To  the 
homesick  young  man,  shut  up  in  the 
vault  in  Washington,  the  scenes  of  his  na 
tive  hills  took  on  a  beauty  and  charm 
they  never  could  have  done  had  he  remained 
there  among  those  very  hills  where  his 
eyes  and  senses  could  drink  their  fill  every 
hour.  It  seems  to  me  like  a  lucky  chance 
that  his  ambition  to  write,  already  manifest 


150  MYFATHER 

and  firmly  fixed,   took  the  course  it  did: 
writing  about  Nature. 

"I  must  have  been  a  sport/1  he  says  of 
himself — a  born  word  worshipper,  a  man 
fired  with  unquenchable  literary  ambition, 
a  lover  of  the  best  of  the  world's  books, 
born  of  parents  who  knew  not  the  meaning 
even  of  the  words.  I  doubt  very  much 
that  any  of  his  immediate  family,  that  is 
of  his  own  generation,  read  a  line  in  any 
of  his  books.  His  sister  told  him  not  to 
write,  that  "it  was  bad  for  the  head" — 
how  different  he  was  from  them  all  is 
shown  in  an  incident  Mother  once  related, 
and  which  can  be  told  only  with  a  word 
of  explanation.  During  the  war  he  and 
Mother  had  gone  "out  home,"  as  he  always 
spoke  of  visiting  the  parents  on  the  home 
stead,  and  during  dinner  Grandfather  ex 
claimed:  "I'd  like  to  see  Abe  Lincoln 
hung  higher  than  Haman  and  I'd  like 
to  have  hold  of  the  rope!"  Father  sat 
speechless  with  pain  and  amazement,  then 
silently  pushing  back  his  plate  he  rose 


MYFATHER  15! 

and  silently  walked  from  the  room.  Then 
Grandmother  "went  for"  Grandfather. 
But  Grandfather  did  not  realize  what  he 
was  saying,  and  he  would  have  been  one 
of  the  very  last  to  have  harmed  Lincoln, 
or  any  one  else  for  that  matter.  The  in 
cident  shows  how  different  those  passion 
ate,  intense,  and  bitter-feeling  times  were 
from  ours,  and  how  the  spread  of  the 
magazines  and  the  illustrated  papers  has 
broadened  and  mellowed  the  feelings  of  the 
people. 

Father  often  spoke  of  his  joy  when  the 
Atlantic  accepted  his  first  article,  the  one 
on  "Expression"  which  was  attributed  to 
Emerson — he  felt  a  new  world  had  opened 
up  for  him,  new  worlds  to  explore  and 
conquer  with  unlimited  possibilities.  His 
ambition  to  write  got  a  tremendous  incen 
tive.  At  that  time  he  was  teaching  school 
at  a  small  town  near  Newburgh  and  when 
Saturday  came  he  wanted  to  go  into  the 
parlour  for  his  day's  work.  That  was  the 
time  of  the  supremacy  of  the  parlour,  the 


152  MYFATHER 

darkened  room  held  sacred  for  special 
occasions,  funerals,  and  Sunday  company 
and  such,  and  Mother  had  no  notion  of  its 
order  being  disturbed  and  its  sanctity  pro 
faned  by  such  a  frivolous  thing  as  writing 
— she  locked  the  door.  I  think  Father 
took  it  as  an  insult,  not  to  himself,  but  to 
his  calling,  a  deadly  insult  to  his  god  of 
literature,  and  in  what  to  me  was  a  fine 
and  noble  and  justifiable  frenzy  he  smashed 
and  kicked  the  door  into  "smithereens." 
I  applaud;  I'm  glad  he  did  it;  he  proved 
himself  worthy  of  his  chosen  god.  Mother 
no  doubt  cried.  Poor  demolished  door — 
a  small  and  material  sacrifice  indeed  for 
the  great  god  of  letters! 

Those  years  were  hard  ones  in  many 
ways  for  Father,  the  years  in  the  late  '50*5 
when  he  was  teaching  school  and  trying 
many  things,  trying  to  find  himself  and 
make  a  living  and  appease  the  material 
ambitions  of  Mother.  One  summer  he 
spent  on  the  old  homestead  and  grew 
onions;  the  seed  he  used  was  poor,  few  came 


MY    FATHER  153 

up,  and  a  summer  of  hard  work,  for  both 
him  and  Mother,  came  to  nothing.  For 
a  time  he  studied  medicine  in  the  office 
of  Doctor  Hull  near  Ashokan,  and  Ihere, 
sitting  in  the  little  office  at  a  spot  now  just 
on  the  edge  of  the  water  of  what  is  now  the 
great  Ashokan  Reservoir,  he  wrote  his  poem, 
"Waiting/'  One  cannot  but  marvel  at 
the  prophecy  of  it,  the  vision  of  the  dis 
couraged  boy  of  twenty-five  every  line  of 
which  has  had  such  a  fulfilment.  He 
tried  several  ventures,  blindly  groping, 
hoping  for  success  which  never  came  to  any 
of  them.  One  of  his  ventures  was  a  share 
in  a  patent  buckle  from  which  he  was  to 
get  rich,  but  from  which  he  got  losses  and 
discouragement — in  fact,  he  had  borrowed 
money  to  go  into  it  and  on  his  non-payment 
he  was  arrested  and  brought  up  the  river 
on  a  night  boat.  Waking  when  the  boat 
stopped  at  Newburgh  and  finding  his  guard 
was  asleep,  he  got  up  and  dressed  and 
went  ashore.  His  arrest  was  not  legal 
anyway,  and  soon  the  matter  was  settled. 


154  MYFATHER 

He  continued  to  teach,  and  finally,  in  the 
early  years  of  the  war,  drifted  to  Washing 
ton.  A  friend  of  his  wanted  him  to  come, 
saying  there  were  many  opportunities  and 
also  holding  out  the  inducement  that  he 
could  meet  Walt  Whitman.  Finally  he 
got  a  position  in  the  Treasury  Department 
and  from  Hugh  McCulloch,  Secretary  of 
the  Treasury,  in  his  "Men  and  Measures 
of  Half  a  Century/'  we  get  a  picture 
of  the  young  John  Burroughs  seeking 
a  job,  a  picture  that  Father  said  was  not 
accurate,  but  which  at  least  shows  how  he 
impressed  a  man  used  to  seeing  many  job- 
seekers  : 

One  day  a  young  man  called  at  my  office  and  said 
to  me  that  he  understood  that  the  force  of  the  bureau 
was  to  be  increased,  and  that  he  should  be  glad  to  be 
employed.  I  asked  him  if  he  had  any  recommenda 
tions.  "I  have  not,"  he  replied;  "I  must  be  my 
own/'  I  looked  at  his  sturdy  form  and  intelligent 
face,  which  impressed  me  so  favourably  that  I  sent 
his  name  to  the  Secretary,  and  the  next  day  he  was 
at  work  as  a  twelve-hundred-dollar  clerk.  I  was  not 
mistaken.  He  was  an  excellent  clerk,  competent, 
faithful,  willing. 


MYFATHER  155 

And  Father  has  said  that  of  the  hundred 
dollars  a  month  he  received,  he  and  Mother 
saved  just  half.  And  the  real  cost  of  living 
then  was  as  high  as  it  is  now;  the  actual  cost 
of  food  and  clothing  and  the  manner  of  living 
have  changed.  Father's  first  book:  "Notes 
on  Walt  Whitman,  Poet  and  Person,"  pub 
lished  in  1867,  now  long  out  of  print,  a 
small  brown  volume  with  gilt  lettering, 
was  brought  out  in  those  Washington 
days.  The  book  was  not  a  success  and 
though  Father  took  a  loss  on  its  publication, 
he  did  not  have  to  deduct  it  from  his  income 
tax.  Of  all  that  life  there  in  Washington 
he  has  spoken  so  much  in  his  books,  "Win 
ter  Sunshine,"  "Indoor  Studies,"  "Whit 
man,  a  Study,"  and  so  on  that  I  will  leave 
it  and  return  to  the  vineyard  here  on  the 
banks  of  the  Hudson. 

It  was  in  1872  that  Father  and  Mother 
came  here  and  bought  about  a  nine-acre 
place,  sloping  from  the  road  down  to  the 
water,  living  for  a  time,  nearly  a  year,  in 
a  small  house  up  by  the  road,  during  which 


156  MYFATHER 

time  they  were  building  the  stone  house, 
the  building  of  which  Father  has  described 
in  "Roof-Tree/'  He  had  wanted  a  stone 
house,  and  here  was  plenty  of  stone,  "wild 
stone"  as  a  native  called  them,  to  be  picked 
up,  weathered  and  soft  in  colouring,  only 
a  short  haul  and  a  few  touches  with  the 
hammer  or  peen  needed  to  make  them  into 
building  stone.  He  has  often  spoken  of 
Mother's  first  visit  to  her  new  home,  just 
as  the  foundation  was  nicely  started,  and 
of  her  grief  and  disappointment  when  she 
saw  the  size  of  the  building.  The  founda 
tion  of  a  house,  open  to  the  sky,  gives  no 
idea  of  the  size  of  the  finished  building,  and 
it  was  in  vain  that  Father  tried  to  explain 
this.  "I  showed  her  the  plans/'  he  often 
said,  "so  many  feet  this  way  and  so  many 
that,  such  a  size  to  this  room  and  such  a 
size  to  that,  but  it  was  no  use,  she  cried 
and  took  on  at  a  great  rate/'  Father 
was  bank  receiver  then,  getting  three  thou 
sand  a  year,  and  on  that  he  was  building 
this  big,  three-story  stone  house.  He  took 


MY    PATH  ER  157 

great  pleasure  in  it — he  loved  to  tell  of  the 
Irish  mason  who  went  off  on  a  drunk  just 
when  he  was  working  on  the  stone  chimney. 
Disgusted  at  the  delay  Father  went  up,  and 
with  hammer  and  trowel  went  at  the  chim 
ney  himself,  and  the  sobering  mason  could 
see  him  from  Hyde  Park,  across  the  river. 
When  he  was  sober  enough  to  come  back  and 
go  on  with  his  work  he  carefully  inspected 
what  Father  had  done  and  exclaimed,  "and 
you  are  a  hondy  mon,  ye  are." 

The  southwest  bedroom  on  the  third  floor 
Father  was  to  have  for  his  room,  his  study, 
where  he  could  write.  This  room  he  pan 
elled  to  the  ceiling  with  native  woods :  maple, 
oak,  beech,  birch,  tulip,  and  others,  and  I 
like  to  think  of  his  happy  anticipation,  his 
dreams  of  the  happy  hours  he  would  spend 
in  this  room,  and  of  the  writing  he  would  do. 
But  he  did  no  writing  here,  for  a  few  years 
later  he  built  the  bark-covered  study  down 
on  the  edge  of  the  bank,  then  a  few  years 
later  yet  he  built  Slabsides,  two  miles  over 
the  low  mountain.  It  was  there,  especially 


158  MYFATHER 

in  the  study,  that  he  did  the  bulk  of  all  his 
literary  work. 

Mother  was  a  materialist;  she  never 
rated  literary  efforts  very  high;  she  often 
seemed  to  think  that  Father  should  do 
the  work  of  the  hired  man  and  then  do  his 
writing  nights  and  holidays.  She  could 
see  no  sense  in  taking  the  best  hours  of  the 
day  for  "scribbling,"  and  it  was  only  in 
the  later  years  when  Father  had  a  steady 
income  from  his  writings  that  her  point 
of  view  softened.  She  was  what  they 
called  in  those  days  a  "good  housekeeper " 
and  she  kept  it  so  well  that  Father  had  to 
move  out  for  his  working  hours,  first  to 
the  study,  then  two  miles  away.  When 
it  came  to  housework,  Mother  possessed 
the  quality  called  inevitableness  to  an 
extraordinary  degree.  She  had  a  way  of 
fastening  a  cloth  about  her  head,  a  sort  of 
forerunner  of  the  boudoir  cap  of  to-day, 
a  means  of  protecting  her  hair  from  any 
imaginary  dust,  and  this  became  a  symbol, 
a  battle  flag  of  the  goddess  of  housecleaning. 


MY     FATHER  159 

father  was  ordered  out  of  the  library, 
where  he  did  his  writing,  and  his  thread 
was  rudely  broken;  it  was  a  day  when  sap 
did  not  run.  For  a  high-strung,  temper 
amental  being,  hasty  and  quick  tempered, 
I  think  he  showed  wonderful  patience,  a 
patience  that  does  him  great  credit.  And 
yet  in  many  ways  Mother  was  an  invalu 
able  helpmate,  she  was  a  balance  wheel 
that  kept  their  world  moving  steadily, 
and  I  am  sure  saved  Father  from  many 
mistakes  and  extravagances. 

It  was  only  years  afterward,  when  he 
began  to  ship  grapes,  that  Father  named 
his  place  "Riverby."  He  had  been  reading 
a  book  of  adventure  to  me,  Stevenson's 
"Black  Arrow/'  and  in  it  there  was  a 
place  named  "Shoreby,"  or  "by-the-shore." 
This  suggested  the  name  of  "Riverby," 
or  "by-the-river,"  to  Father  for  his  place. 
So  it  was  adopted  and  became  the  trade 
mark,  "  Riverby  Vineyards/'  an  oval  stamp 
with  a  bunch  of  grapes  in  the  middle  and 
the  address  below.  It  became  the  name  of 


160  MYFATHER 

the  place,  the  name  of  one  of  Father's 
books,  and  was  stamped  on  the  lid  of  every 
crate  or  basket  of  grapes. 

Father  was  an  absolutely  honest  man, 
honest  not  only  in  packing  a  crate  of  grapes, 
but  honest  as  to  his  own  weaknesses  and 
shortcomings.  I  can  never  forget  how  he 
admired  an  exclamation  attributed  to  Gen 
eral  Lee  at  Gettysburg.  Pickett  had  made 
his  famous  charge  and  his  veterans  had 
come  back,  a  few  of  them,  defeated,  and 
Lee  said  to  them,  "It's  all  my  fault,  boys!" 
"That  is  the  true  spirit  of  greatness," 
Father  said,  thoughtfully.  And  when  the 
Titanic  went  down  in  mid-ocean  with  such  a 
loss  of  life,  and  the  order  was  for  the  women 
and  children  first  to  the  lifeboats,  men  to 
keep  back,  Father  said :  "That  took  real  grit. 
I  hope  I'll  never  have  to  face  such  a  crisis." 

At  another  time  the  boys  were  steal 
ing  his  grapes,  the  first  Delawares,  not 
yet  ripe  enough,  and  then  scattering  the 
bunches  they  could  not  eat  along  the  road. 
Father  wrapped  himself  in  a  waterproof 


MYFATHER  l6l 

and  at  dark  sat  down  under  one  of  the 
vines  to  wait.  Strange  to  say,  he  went 
to  sleep,  and  stranger  still  one  of  the  boys 
did  come,  and  came  to  the  very  vine  under 
which  Father  was  sleeping.  He  was  in 
stantly  awake  and,  watching  his  chance, 
jumped  up  and  grabbed  the  boy.  There 
was  a  swift  scrimmage,  the  boy  breaking 
away  and  fleeing.  As  he  went  over  the 
stone  wall  Father  clinched  him  and  they 
went  over  together,  taking  the  top  of  the 
wall  over  on  them.  Father  being  ham 
pered  by  his  coat,  the  boy  was  able  to 
break  away  and  fled  up  the  hill  toward 
the  road  where  he  had  left  his  bicycle. 
He  was  unable  to  get  away  on  it,  however, 
and  ran  away  into  the  night,  leaving  his 
bicycle  as  hostage.  In  the  morning  when 
I  came  down  I  found  Father  like  a  boy  with 
a  new  toy.  "Come  out  in  the  wash-house 
and  see  my  prisoner/'  he  laughed,  and  could 
hardly  contain  himself  for  the  fun  of  it  all. 
I  came,  and  there  stood  the  bicycle,  and 
Father  danced  a  war  dance  about  it.  Later 


1 62  MYFATHER 

the  boy  came  and  owned  up  and  insisted 
on  paying  something,  but  in  all  kindliness 
Father  would  not  of  course  take  any  of 
the  boy's  hard-earned  money.  He  simply 
explained  the  situation  to  him  and  I  am 
sure  the  boy  never  came  back,  as  he  might 
have  done  if  he  had  not  been  treated  gener 
ously.  At  another  time  some  boys  from 
across  the  river  were  caught  red-handed 
stealing  grapes.  After  scaring  them  for  a 
time,  Father  gave  them  some  grapes  and 
sent  them  home.  He  was  always  cautioning 
us  about  cutting  grapes,  to  cut  only  such  as 
we  would  be  willing  to  eat  ourselves  not  to 
mislead  or  cheat  the  purchaser.  One  of  his 
first  letters,  written  thirty  years  ago,  is 
mainly  about  the  vineyards — it  is  written 
on  paper  made  to  imitate  birch  bark,  and 
written  in  a  swift,  up  and  down  hand  that 
is  almost  as  easily  read  as  the  best  printing: 

Onteora  Club, 

n,         T  July  25>  l&91- 

DEAR  JULIAN, 

I  want  you  to  write  me  when  you  receive  this  if  the 
dog  has  turned  up  yet.     If  he  has  not  you  better 


MYFATHER  163 

drive  down  to  Bundy's  again  and  see  if  he  has  been 
there.  Also  tell  me  if  the  hawk  flies,  etc.  Has 
there  been  a  heavy  rain,  and  has  it  done  any  damage 
to  the  vineyard?  It  rained  very  hard  here  the  night 
I  arrived.  If  it  has  damaged  the  vineyard  I  will 
come  back.  Look  about  and  see  if  there  is  any 
grape  rot  yet.  I  want  Zeke  to  send  me  a  crate  of 
those  pears  there  in  the  currants.  .  .  .  It  is  very 
pleasant  up  here,  but  I  fear  I  will  be  dined  and  tead 
and  drove  and  walked  until  I  am  sick.  I  have  had 
no  good  sleep  yet.  Mr.  Johnson  of  the  Century  is 
here.  We  sleep  in  a  large  fine  tent.  It  is  in  the 
woods  and  is  just  like  camping  out,  except  that  we 
do  not  have  a  bed  of  boughs.  It  is  warm  and  rainy 
here  this  morning.  Tell  me  if  you  and  your  mother 
are  going  out  to  Roxbury,  or  anywhere  else.  Tell 
Northrop  to  send  on  my  letters  if  there  are  any.  I 
have  not  received  any  yet.  Tell  me  what  Dude  and 
Zeke  have  been  doing. 

Your  affectionate  father, 
JOHN  BURROUGHS. 


The  dog  spoken  of  was  Dan,  or  Dan 
Bundy-ah,  a  pretty  medium-sized  dog  that 
won  Father's  heart  and  was  bought  for 
two  dollars,  which  seemed  a  big  price 
for  a  dog  then,  of  a  workman  who  helped 
us  in  the  vineyards.  He  was  always  run 
ning  off  home.  "It  breaks  a  dog  all  up 


1 64  MYFATHER 

to  change  his  home,  or  rather  household; 
it  makes  of  him  a  citizen  of  the  world/' 
said  Father.  How  he  did  love  a  nice  dog! 
Even  in  his  last  illness  he  often  spoke  of 
the  one  we  owned;  he  had  a  true  feeling 
of  comradeship  for  a  dog. 

The  hawk  referred  to  is  the  young  marsh 
hawk  we  got  from  the  nest  and  raised  our 
selves.  I  know  it  fell  to  me  to  supply 
this  hawk  with  food:  English  sparrows, 
red  squirrels,  and  small  game,  a  ceaseless 
undertaking  and  one  which  took  most  of 
my  time,  so  much  so  that  Mother  took 
me  to  task  for  it  time  and  again.  When 
later  Father  "wrote  up"  the  hawk  and  got 
something  for  the  article  I  felt  that  I  should 
be  paid  for  what  I  had  been  compelled 
to  endure  in  the  cause!  "Fifty  cents 
for  every  scolding  I  got/'  was  what  I 
demanded.  "You  are  getting  your  pay 
now/'  Father  replied  as  he  watched  me 
eat. 

Did  the  rain  do  any  damage  to  the  vine 
yard? — Yes,  that  was  a  fear  that  was  al- 


MYFATHER  165 

ways  present.  The  steep  side  hills  would 
often  wash  very  badly,  the  soil  being  carried 
down  the  hill,  costing  us  much  labour  in 
bringing  it  back.  When  there  was  a  slack 
time  there  was  always  dirt  to  drag  up  the 
steep  slopes.  I  know  one  time  some  of  it 
was  carried  up  the  hill  by  hand.  We 
nailed  two  sticks  for  handles  on  a  box  and 
Charley  and  I  spent  days  carrying  this 
box  full  of  dirt  up  a  very  steep  spot — 
"just  like  two  jackasses/'  Father  exclaimed 
in  fun.  Though  he  could  say  in  his  poem — 

"  I  rave  no  more  'gainst  time  or  fate " 

he  did  often  rave  against  the  weather, 
especially  the  "mad,  intemperate/'  as  he 
called  them,  summer  showers.  Once  there 
was  a  hailstorm.  We  were  "out  home/' 
and  after  supper  Mother  brought  forth 
a  telegram,  saying,  "I  did  not  give  you 
this  until  after  you  had  eaten."  Even 
I  was  conscious  of  the  tactless  way  she  did 
it,  the  household  looking  on.  With  drawn 
face  Father  slowly  opened  and  read:  "Hail- 


1 66  MYFATHER 

storm,  grapes  all  destroyed.11  How  limp 
Father  felt!  He  said:  "I  had  compli 
mented  myself  when  I  looked  at  those 
grapes.  I  had  seen  several  statements 
that  grapes  would  bring  a  good  price  this 
fall."  Well,  we  found  that  half  of  them 
could  be  saved  and  that  the  terrific  hail 
storm  had  extended  over  only  two  vine 
yards — the  path  of  the  storm  not  half  a 
mile  across  in  either  direction,  a  curious 
freak,  but  one  that  in  ten  minutes  took 
away  all  profits  for  the  year. 

If  I  can  invent  a  phrase  I  will  say  that 
Father  had  the  pride  of  humility;  that  is, 
he  had  the  true  spirit  of  the  craftsman — 
pride  in  and  for  his  work,  and  not  pride 
of  self.  Nothing  was  too  good  for  his  art, 
nothing  too  poor  for  himself.  The  follow 
ing  letter,  written  twenty-eight  years  ago, 
gives  us  a  glimpse  of  himself  as  he  was  then, 
alone  and  introspective.  There  evidently 
had  been  a  family  jar,  something  that 
came  far  too  frequently,  and  Father  was 
alone  here  at  Riverby. 


MYFATHER  167 

West  Park, 
MY  DEAR  JULIAN,  July  24,  [1893]. 

Your  letter  is  rec'd.  Glad  you  are  going  to  try 
the  hay  field.  Don't  try  to  mow  away.  But  in 
the  open  air  I  think  you  can  stand  it.  It  is  getting 
very  dry  here.  I  think  you  had  a  fine  shower 
Saturday  night  about  eight  o'clock.  I  stood  on 
the  top  of  Slide  Mountain  at  that  hour  all  alone 
and  I  could  look  straight  into  the  heart  of  the  storm 
and  when  it  lightened  I  could  see  the  rain  sweeping 
down  over  the  Roxbury  hills.  The  rain  was  not 
heavy  on  Slide  and  I  was  safely  stowed  away  under 
a  rock.  I  left  here  Friday  afternoon,  went  up  to 
Big  Indian  where  I  stayed  all  night.  I  found  Mr. 
Sickley  and  his  family  boarding  there  at  Dutchers. 
Saturday  I  tried  to  persuade  Mr.  S.  to  go  with 
me  to  Slide,  but  he  had  promised  his  party  to 
go  another  way.  So  I  pushed  on  alone  with  my 
roll  of  blankets  on  my  back.  I  was  very  hot  and 
I  drank  every  spring  dry  along  the  route.  I  reached 
the  top  of  Slide  about  two  o'clock  and  was  glad 
after  all  to  have  the  mountain  all  to  myself.  It  is 
very  grand.  I  made  myself  a  snug  camp  under  a 
shelving  rock.  Every  porcupine  on  the  mountain 
called  on  me  during  the  night,  but  I  slept  fairly 
well.  I  stayed  till  noon  on  Sunday,  when  I  went 
down  to  Dutchers.  I  made  the  trip  easily  and  with 
out  fatigue,  tramping  13  miles  that  hot  Saturday 
with  my  traps.  Big  Indian  valley  is  very  beautiful. 
Monday  morning  Mr.  Sickley  walked  down  to  the 
station  with  me  and  I  got  home  on  the  little  boat, 
well  paid  for  my  trip.  I  doubt  if  I  come  up  to 


1 68  MYFATHER 

Roxbury  now,  I  fear  the  air  will  not  agree  with  me. 
Do  not  follow  your  mother's  example  in  one  respect, 
that  is,  do  not  think  very  highly  of  yourself  and  very 
meanly  of  other  people;  but  rather  reverse  it — 
think  meanly  of  yourself  and  well  of  other  people — 
think  anything  is  good  enough  for  yourself  and 
nothing  too  good  for  others.  The  berries  are  about 
done — too  dry  for  them.  I  may  go  to  Johnsons 
and  Gilders,  am  not  in  the  mood  yet.  Write  me 
when  you  get  this.  Love  to  all. 

Your  affectionate  father, 

JOHN  BURROUGHS. 

In  these  early  letters  to  me  he  always  signed 
his  name  in  full,  something  he  never  did  later. 

The  blankets  were  two  army  blankets, 
of  a  blue-gray  with  two  blackish  stripes 
at  each  end:  they  were  smoke-scented  from 
a  hundred  camp  fires  and  there  were  holes 
burned  in  them  from  sparks.  They  had 
been  in  many  woods  and  forests. 

The  berries  so  lightly  spoken  of  were 
those  of  a  large  patch  below  the  study,  a 
venture  which  Father  made  in  small  fruit 
and  which  he  was  glad  enough  not  to  repeat. 
The  berries  were  too  insistent  in  their 
demands;  they  just  had  to  be  picked  over 


MY    FATHER  169 

every  day  or  they  wept  little  reddish  tears 
and  became  too  soft  to  be  shipped.  When 
Father  bought  the  place  it  was  nearly  all 
out  in  red  berries — the  old  Marlboroughs 
and  Antwerps  and  Cuthberts,  and  Father 
continued  them  until  they  tried  his  patience 
beyond  endurance. 

In  winter  there  were  no  grapes  or  berries 
and  for  a  time  Father  went  on  some  lecture 
trips,  but  only  for  a  time,  for  he  was  too 
nervous,  too  easily  embarrassed,  too  ex 
citable  for  lecturing.  It  took  too  much 
out  of  him.  Somewhere,  something  un 
pleasant  happened,  and  for  a  long  time  after 
ward  he  did  not  give  a  formal  lecture,  if  he 
ever  did  make  a  formal  address. 

He  told  one  of  his  audiences  that  Emerson 
said  we  gain  strength  by  doing  what  we  do 
not  like  to  do,  and  everyone  laughed,  for  it 
was  exactly  the  way  Father  felt  about  his 
lecturing.  Nevertheless,  he  seemed  to  have 
a  pretty  good  time  while  on  a  lecture  trip,  as 
the  following  letter,  written  when  away 
lecturing,  will  show: 


I7O  MYFATHER 

V  Cambridge,  Mass., 

Feb.  6,  '96. 
MY  DEAR  JULIAN, 

Things  have  gone  very  well  with  me  so  far.  I 
reached  Boston  Sunday  night  at  9:05.  I  went  to 
the  Adams  house  that  night.  Monday  at  3  P.  M. 
1  went  out  to  Lowell  and  spoke  before  the  women — 
a  fine  lot  of  them.  I  got  along  very  well.  One 
of  them  took  me  home  to  dinner.  I  came  back 
to  the  Adams  house  at  9  o'clock.  Tuesday  night 
I  went  home  with  Kennedy  and  stayed  all  night. 
Wednesday  I  came  out  to  Cambridge  to  the  house 
of  Mrs.  Ole  Bull,  who  had  sent  me  an  invitation.  I 
am  with  her  now:  it  is  raining  furiously  all  day. 
To-night  I  am  to  speak  before  the  Procopeia  club, 
and  to-morrow  night  before  the  Metaphysical 
Society.  I  met  Clifton  Johnson  in  Boston  and  I 
am  going  to  his  place  on  Saturday  and  may  stay 
over  Sunday  or  I  may  come  home  on  the  5 : 04  train 
Sunday.  ...  I  saw  some  Harvard  professors 
last  night.  I  hope  you  and  your  mother  keep  well 
and  live  in  peace  and  quiet.  Love  to  you  both. 
Your  affectionate  father, 
JOHN  BURROUGHS. 

One  of  the  enemies  we  had  to  fight  in 
the  vineyard  was  the  rot,  the  black  rot, 
an  imported  disease  of  the  grape  that  for  a 
few  years  swept  everything.  Then  spray 
ing  with  the  Bordeaux  mixture  of  lime  and 


MYFATHER  171 

copper  sulphate  checked  and  finally  stop 
ped  it  altogether — but  it  was  the  early- 
sprayings  that  counted.  One  year  I  re 
member  Father  neglected  this,  in  his  easy, 
optimistic  way,  and  later,  when  the  rot 
began,  spraying  was  in  vain,  and  I  know 
that  I  took  him  to  task  for  it,  to  my  regret 
now.  The  following  letter  speaks  of  this 
and  of  my  going  to  college,  something  we 
did  not  consider  until  the  last  moment. 
Father,  not  being  a  college  man,  had  not 
thought  of  it: 

Lee,  Mass.,  July  21  [1897]. 
DEAR  JULIAN, 

I  rec'd  your  letter  this  morning.  I  am  having  a 
nice  time  here,  but  think  I  shall  go  back  home  this 
week,  as  the  rot  seems  to  be  working  in  the  Niagaras 
quite  badly,  and  the  rain  and  heat  continue.  Mr. 
Taylor  is  dead  and  buried.  He  died  the  day  1 
left  (Friday).  Rodman  likes  Harvard  very  much 
and  says  he  will  do  anything  he  can  for  you.  He 
says  if  you  want  to  mess  in  Memorial  Hall  you 
ought  to  put  your  name  down  at  once.  There  is  a 
special  Harvard  student  here,  a  Mr.  Hickman,  who 
is  tutoring  Mr.  Gilder's  children.  I  like  him  very 
much.  He  is  in  the  Lawrence  Scientific  School — 
about  your  age  and  a  fine  fellow — from  Nova  Scotia. 


172  MYFATHER 

I  have  been  to  the  Johnsons  at  Stockbridge.  Owen 
is  in  love  with  Yale  and  wants  you  to  come  there. 
Owen  will  be  a  writer,  he  has  already  got  on  the 
Yale  "Lit."  He  is  vastly  improved  and  I  like  him 
much.  We  had  a  five  mile  walk  together  yesterday. 
Rodman  I  think  will  be  a  journalist.  He  is  already 
one  of  the  editors  of  a  Harvard  paper — "The 
Crimson"  I  think.  The  country  here  is  much  like 
the  Delaware  below  Hobart.  I  shall  stop  at  Salis 
bury  to  visit  Miss  Warner  and  then  home  Friday 
or  Saturday.  I  will  write  to  my  publishers  to 
send  you  Hill's  Rhetoric.  I  think  you  better  come 
home  early  next  week  and  stop  with  me  at  SS. 
Love  to  all. 

Your  loving  father, 

JOHN  BURROUGHS. 

If  the  grapes  fail  we  will  try  to  raise  the  money 
for  your  Harvard  expenses.  At  the  end  of  1898, 
I  expect  to  get  much  more  money  from  my  books — 
at  least  $1,500  a  year. 

This  last  was  in  pencil,  a  postscript. 
Evidently  Father  had  the  grape  rot  in  mind, 
but  at  this  date,  July  2ist,  the  die  was  cast; 
there  was  nothing  one  could  do  then. 
If  they  had  been  properly  sprayed  in  May 
and  June  one  could  laugh  at  the  black  rot, 
but  very  likely  Father  had  not  attended 
to  it;  that  is,  he  had  made  the  hired  man 


MYFATHER  173 

spray.  He  had  other  fish  to  fry,  as  he  often 
said.  To  me  the  marvel  of  it  all  is  that 
he  had  so  many  irons  in  the  fire  and  was 
always  able  to  write.  The  different  proper 
ties  that  Father  accumulated  in  his  life 
time  were  alone  enough  to  take  all  his  time 
were  it  not  for  his  happy  nature  and  won 
derful  faculty  of  being  able  to  put  them 
aside  when  the  muse  nudged  his  elbow. 
First  he  had  the  place  here,  Riverby,  to 
which  he  added  another  nine  acres  later, 
clearing  and  ditching  it  all  and  getting  it 
all  out  in  the  best  grapes,  the  ones  that 
made  the  most  work  and  trouble:  Delawares, 
Niagaras,  Wordens,  and  Moore's  Early. 
There  were  other  kinds  tried,  the  once  fa 
mous  Gaertner,  Moore's  Diamond,  the  Green 
Mountain  or  Winchell,  and  so  on.  And 
currants,  too,  acres  of  them  set  under  and 
between  the  rows  of  grapes,  and  Bartlett 
pears,  and  peaches.  As  I  write,  a  picture 
comes  to  mind  of  Father  up  in  a  peach 
tree,  on  a  high  step-ladder,  picking  peaches, 
and  of  some  girls  with  cameras  taking  his 


1 74  MYFATHER 

picture  and  all  laughing  and  the  girls 
exclaiming:  "At  the  mercy  of  the  Kodak- 
ers"— and  Father  enjoying  the  joke  and 
picking  out  soft  peaches  for  them.  He  liked 
to  pick  peaches.  The  big  handsome  fruit 
in  its  setting  of  glistening  green  leaves 
appealed  to  him,  and  as  he  said,  "When  I 
come  to  one  too  soft  to  ship  I  can  eat  it." 
I  so  vividly  remember  our  carrying  the 
filled  baskets  to  the  dock  where  they  were 
shipped  to  town  and  Father  being  ahead 
with  a  basket  on  his  shoulder  and  of  his 
stumbling  and  going  headlong,  his  head 
hanging  over  the  steep  ledge  of  rocks, 
the  basket  bursting  in  its  fall  and  the 
peaches  going  far  and  wide  over  the  rocks 
below.  We  gathered  up  the  peaches,  and 
Father  was  not  hurt,  though  he  fell  so  close 
to  the  top  of  the  steep  ledge  that  his  head 
and  shoulder  hung  over  and  his  face  got  red 
in  his  struggle  to  hold  himself  back. 

Then  in  the  early  nineties  he  bought  the 
land  and  built  Slabsides,  clearing  up  the 
three  acres  of  celery  swamp;  and  for  a 


MYFATHER  175 

while  he  spent  much  time  there.  "  Wild  Life 
About  My  Cabin"  was  one  of  the  nature 
essays  written  of  Slabsides.  The  cabin 
was  covered  with  slabs,  and  Father  wanted 
to  give  it  a  name  that  would  stick,  he  said, 
one  that  would  be  easily  associated  with 
the  place,  and  he  certainly  succeeded,  for 
everyone  knows  of  Slabsides.  Uncle  Hiram, 
Father's  oldest  brother,  spent  much  time 
with  him  there,  the  two  brothers,  worlds 
apart  in  their  mental  make-up  and  their 
outlook,  spending  many  lonely  evenings 
together,  Father  reading  the  best  philos 
ophy  or  essays,  Uncle  Hiram  drumming 
and  humming  under  his  breath,  dreaming 
his  dreams,  too,  but  never  looking  at  a 
book  or  even  a  magazine.  Soon  he  would 
be  asleep  in  his  chair,  and  before  the  low- 
burning  open  fire  Father  would  be  dreaming 
his  dreams,  so  many  of  which  he  made 
come  true,  listening  to  the  few  night  sounds 
of  the  woods.  Father  tried  hard  to  make 
Uncle  Hiram's  dreams  come  true.  He  gave 
him  a  home  for  many  years  and  helped 


Ij6  MYFATHER 

him  with  his  bee-keeping  and  sympathized 
with  him  fully  and  understood  his  hope 
that  "next  year"  the  bees  would  pay  and 
return  all. 

Someone  caught  a  big  copperhead,  one 
of  the  meanest  of  all  poisonous  snakes,  and 
one  which  is  quite  rare  here,  fortunately, 
and  for  a  time  Father  kept  it  in  a  barrel 
near  Slabsides.  Later  he  grew  tired  of  it, 
but  he  had  not  the  heart  to  kill  it,  his  pris 
oner.  "After  keeping  a  thing  shut  up  and 
watching  it  every  day  I  can't  go  out  and 
kill  it  in  cold  blood/'  he  said  in  half  apology 
for  his  act.  He  told  the  man  who  worked 
on  the  swamp  to  carry  the  snake,  barrel 
and  all,  up  among  the  rocks  and  let  him  go. 
The  man,  when  out  of  sight,  promptly 
killed  the  snake.  It  seems  to  me  that  they 
were  both  right  and  the  snake,  though  inno 
cent  himself,  had  to  suffer. 

It  was  about  two  miles  to  Slabsides,  a 
good  part  of  it  through  the  woods,  and 
some  of  it  up  a  very  steep  hill.  I  can  see 
Father  starting  off  with  his  market  basket 


MYFATHER  1 77 

on  his  arm,  the  basket  as  full  of  provisions 
and  reading  matter  as  his  step  was  full 
of  vigour.  I'll  admit  he  did  often  raid 
Mother's  pantry,  and  he  was  not  averse 
to  taking  pie  and  cake.  In  fact,  he  was 
brought  up  on  cake  largely,  and  always 
ate  of  it  freely  until  these  last  years.  "His 
folks,"  as  Mother  would  say,  always  had  at 
least  three  kinds  of  cake  three  times  a  day, 
and  then  more  cake  the  last  thing  before 
going  to  bed.  At  Slabsides  most  of  the 
cooking  was  done  over  the  open  fire — 
potatoes  and  onions  baked  in  the  ashes, 
lamb  chops  broiled  over  the  coals,  peas 
fresh  from  the  garden — how  Father  did 
enjoy  it  all — the  sweetness  of  things!  He 
would  hum: 

"  He  lived  all  alone,  close  to  the  bone 

Where  the  meat  is  sweetest,  he  constantly  eatest," 

and  he  liked  to  think  of  this  old  rhyme 
as  applying  to  himself. 

The  interior  of  Slabsides  was  finished  in 
birch  and  beech  poles,  with  the  bark  on 
them,  and  much  of  the  furniture  he  made 


1 78  MY     FATHER 

of  natural  crooks  and  crotches.  He  always 
had  his  "eye  peeled/'  as  he  said,  for  some 
natural  piece  of  wood  that  he  could  use. 
The  bittersweet  has  a  way  of  winding  itself 
about  some  sapling,  and  as  the  two  grow 
it  puts  a  mark  about  the  tree  that  makes 
it  look  as  though  it  were  twisted.  One 
such  piece,  a  small  hemlock,  is  over  the 
fireplace,  and  Father  would  tell  how  he 
told  the  girls  who  visited  Slabsides  that 
he  and  the  hired  man  twisted  this  stick 
by  hand.  "We  told  them  we  took  it  when 
it  was  green/'  he  would  laugh,  as  he  told 
the  story,  "and  twisted  it  as  you  see  it, 
then  fastened  it  and  it  dried  or  seasoned 
that  way — and  they  believed  it!"  and  he 
would  chuckle  over  it  mightily. 

In  1913,  Father  was  able,  with  the  help 
of  a  friend,  to  buy  the  old  homestead  at 
Roxbury,  and  then  he  developed  one  of  the 
farmhouses  there,  one  built  long  ago  by 
his  brother  Curtis,  and  thus  made  the  third 
landmark  in  his  life,  any  one  of  which  was 
enough  to  occupy  the  time  and  care  of  one 


MYFATHER  I  7Q 

man.  He  called  it  Woodchuck  Lodge, 
and  the  last  years  of  his  life  were  spent 
largely  there,  going  out  in  June  and  return 
ing  in  October. 

At  the  time  the  following  letter  was  writ 
ten,  Father  spent  much  of  his  time  at  Slab- 
sides  and  his  interest  in  both  the  celery  and 
lettuce  grown  there,  as  well  as  the  grapes 
at  Riverby,  was  most  keen.  The  black 
duck  referred  to  was  one  I  had  winged  and 
brought  home;  it  was  excessively  wild  until 
we  put  it  with  the  tame  ducks,  whereupon, 
as  Father  expressed  it,  "He  took  his  cue 
from  them  and  became  tamer  than  the  tame 
ones." 

Slabsides,  July  13,  '97. 
MY  DEAR  JULIAN, 

I  enclose  a  circular  from  Amherst  College  that 
came  to  you  yesterday.  You  would  doubtless  do 
as  well  or  better  at  one  of  the  small  colleges  as  you 
would  at  Harvard.  The  instruction  is  quite  as 
good.  It  is  not  the  college  that  makes  the  man, 
but  the  reverse.  Or  you  might  go  to  Columbia 
this  fall.  You  would  be  nearer  home  and  have 
just  as  able  instructors  as  at  Harvard.  Harvard 
has  no  first  class  men  now.  But  if  you  have  set 


l8o  MY    FATHER 

your  heart  on  Harvard,  you  would  of  course  do  just 
as  well  as  a  special  student  as  if  admitted  to  college. 
You  would  miss  only  non-essentials.  Their  sheep 
skin  you  do  not  want;  all  you  want  is  what  they 
can  teach  you. 

It  has  rained  here  most  of  the  time  since  you 
left.  The  grapes  are  beginning  to  rot  and  if  this 
rain  and  heat  continues  we  may  lose  all  of  them. 
If  the  grapes  go  I  shall  not  have  money  for  you 
to  go  away  this  year. 

Another  duck  was  killed  Saturday  night,  one  of 
the  last  brood.  It  looked  like  the  work  of  a  coon 
and  I  and  Hiram  watched  all  Sunday  night  with  the 
gun,  but  nothing  came  and  nothing  came  last 
night  as  we  know  of. 

Let  me  know  what  you  hear  from  your  chum.  I 
shall  look  for  a  letter  from  you  to-night.  It  is  still 
raining  and  at  four  o'clock  the  sky  looks  as  thick 
and  nasty  as  ever.  It  threatens  to  be  like  eight 
years  ago  when  you  and  I  were  in  the  old  house. 
Tell  me  what  Mr.  Tooker  says,  etc.  I  may  go  to 
Gilders  the  last  of  the  week. 

Your  affectionate  father, 

JOHN  BURROUGHS. 

Your  black  duck  is  getting  tame  and  does  not  hide 
at  all. 

It  is  hard  for  the  present  generation  to 
realize  what  a  shadow,  or  rather  influence, 
the  Civil  War  cast  over  the  days  of  Father's 
generation.  War  veterans,  parades,  pen- 


MY     PATH  E  R  l8l 

sions,  stories  of  the  war — it  coloured  much 
of  the  life,  civil,  social,  political,  and  even 
the  literature  of  the  day.  Some  have 
spoken  of  it,  in  architecture,  as  the  General 
Grant  Period.  The  "panoramas" — what 
has  become  of  them?  I  remember  visiting 
one  with  Father — you  went  into  a  building 
and  up  a  flight  of  stairs  and  came  out  on  a 
balcony,  a  round  balcony  in  the  centre,  and 
all  around  was  a  picture  of  one  of  the  battle 
fields  of  the  war,  bursting  shells,  men  charg 
ing,  falling,  and  all,  always  the  two  flags, 
smoke  enshrouded.  It  made  a  great  im 
pression  on  my  boyish  mind.  Father  knew 
many  war  veterans  and  together  we  read 
the  impressions  of  his  friend,  Charles  Ben- 
ton,  "As  Seen  from  the  Ranks,"  and  he 
kept  up  the  friendships  he  had  made  those 
years  he  lived  in  Washington. 

Washington,  D.  C, 

Mch.  2nd.  [1897.] 
DEAR  JULIAN, 

I  came  on  from  N.  Y.  last  night,  left  N.  Y.  at  3 : 30 
and  was  here  at  8:45,  round  trip  $8,  ticket  good  till 
next  Monday.  I  had  a  nice  time  in  N.  Y.  and  im- 


1 82  MYFATHER 

proved  all  the  time,  though  I  was  much  broken  of 
my  sleep.  I  stayed  with  Hamlin  Garland  at  the 
hotel  New  Amsterdam,  I  like  him  much,  he  is  coming 
on  here.  1  was  out  to  dinner  and  to  lunch  every 
day.  The  Century  paid  me  $125  for  another  short 
article  on  bird  songs.  I  wrote  it  the  week  before 
my  sickness.  It  is  lovely  here  this  morning,  warm 
and  soft  like  April,  the  roads  dusty.  Baker's  people 
are  all  well  and  very  kind  to  me.  They  have  a  large 
house  on  Meridian  Hill  where  it  was  all  wild  land 
when  I  lived  here.  I  shall  stay  here  until  next 
Monday.  Write  me  when  you  get  this  how  matters 
go  and  how  your  mother  is.  Tell  Hiram  you  have 

heard  from  me.         ,,        .     .      ,    , 

Your  loving  father, 

JOHN  BURROUGHS. 

When  I  went  away  to  college  in  the  fall 
of  1897  I  was  able  to  see  our  home  life  there 
at  Riverby  from  a  new  angle,  as  one  must 
often  do,  get  a  short  distance  away  to  get 
a  clear  perspective  of  a  place.  And  it  be 
ing  my  first  time  away  from  home  Father 
wrote  more  frequently,  and  he  dropped 
the  formality  of  his  earlier  letters. 

West  Park,  N.  Y., 

A/I  Oct.  ii.  [1897.] 

MY  DEAR  JULIAN, 

Your  letter  was  here  Monday  morning.  I  am 
sorry  you  did  not  send  some  message  to  your  mother 


MYFATHER  183 

in  it.  You  know  how  quick  she  is  to  take  offence. 
Why  not  hereafter  address  your  letters  to  us  both 
— thus  "  Dear  Father  and  Mother/'  But  write  to 
her  alone  next  time.  How  about  that  course  in 
Geology  given  by  Shaler?  I  thought  you  were  go 
ing  to  take  that?  I  had  rather  you  take  that  than 
any  course  in  English  Composition.  Read  Ruskin's 
"Modern  Painters"  when  you  get  a  chance.  Read 
Emerson's  " English  Traits"  and  his  "Representa 
tive  Men." 

Send  me  some  of  the  pictures  you  took  at  Slab- 
sides  of  the  Suter  girls  and  any  others  that  would 
interest  me. 

I  go  to-day  to  the  Harrimans  at  Arden  for  two  or 
three  days.  On  Saturday  last  I  had  25  Vassar 
girls  at  SS  and  expect  more  this  Saturday.  Lown 
said  Black  Creek  was  full  of  ducks  on  Sunday — I 
see  but  few  on  the  river.  Give  my  love  to  the 
Suter  girls.  .  .  .  Much  fog  here  lately. 

Your  affectionate  father, 
J.  B. 

Ducks  in  Black  Creek — it  was  tantalizing 
to  read  that !  It  brought  back  the  memories 
of  the  days  Father  and  I  hunted  them 
there — I  shall  never  forget  how  impressed 
he  was  by  one  duck,  so  impressed  that  he 
spoke  of  it  at  length  in  an  article  he  wrote — 
"The  Wit  of  a  Duck."  He  was  paddling 


1 84  MYFATHER 

me  up  the  sun-lit  reaches  of  the  Shataca 
on  Black  Creek  when  suddenly  two  dusky 
mallards  or  black  ducks  tore  out  of  the 
willow  herb  and  dodder  and  came  like  the 
wind  over  our  heads.  I  was  using  a  high- 
powered  duck  gun,  and  brought  down  both 
ducks,  one,  however,  with  a  broken  wing. 
The  duck  came  tumbling  down  and  with 
a  fine  splash  struck  the  water,  where  for  a 
moment  it  shone  and  glistened  in  the  sun. 
And  that  was  all,  the  duck  was  gone  in 
stantly,  we  never  saw  it  again.  What  hap 
pened  of  course  was  that  the  duck  dived, 
using  its  other  wing  and  feet,  and  came  up 
in  the  brush,  where  it  hid,  no  doubt  with 
only  half  an  inch  of  its  bill  out  of  water. 
Its  presence  of  mind,  working  instantly  and 
without  hesitation,  caused  Father  to  ex 
claim  in  wonder. 

Father  was  never  a  sportsman  in  the 
strict  sense — he  never  had  a  shotgun  that 
was  really  good  for  anything,  or  any  hunt 
ing  dogs  or  hunting  clothes — a  pair  of 
rubber  boots  used  for  trout  fishing  was 


Q£ 
t-^ 
Q 


MYFATHER  185 

as  far  as  he  got  in  that  direction — unless 
the  soft  felt  hat,  gray,  torn,  with  some 
flies  or  hooks  stuck  in  the  band,  could  be 
counted.  He  was  an  expert  trout  fisher 
man,  but  was  not  averse  to  using  grass 
hoppers,  worms,  live  bait,  or  caddis  fly 
larvae.  I  know  we  stood  one  day  in  the 
Shataca  and  Father  shot  and  shot  at  the 
black  ducks  that  flew  overhead,  and  he 
bemoaned  his  lack  of  skill  in  not  being 
able  to  bring  them  down.  "Dick  Martin 
would  bring  those  fellows  down  every 
time,"  he  would  say.  As  I  look  back  on  it 
with  the  light  of  later  experience  I  am  sure 
the  ducks  were  out  of  range,  and  the 
borrowed  gun  was  a  weak  poor  thing,  not 
a  duck  gun.  We  built  ourselves  a  bough 
house  out  on  a  little  island  in  the  swamp 
and  got  in  it,  crouched  down,  and  soon 
some  ducks  came  down,  down,  lowering 
their  feet  to  drop  in  the  water.  "Don't 
shoot,  Poppie,  don't  shoot!"  I  exclaimed, 
and  he  did  not  shoot,  and  to  this  day  he 
never  knew  why  I  gave  such  bad  advice — 


1 86  MYFATHER 

I  was  afraid  of  the  noise  of  the  gun! 
Father  thought  I  wanted  him  to  wait  until 
they  were  nearer.  But  the  chance  never 
came  again  and  we  went  home  duckless. 

In  one  of  his  essays  Father  spoke  of  a 
large  family  as  being  like  a  big  tree  with 
many  branches  which,  though  it  was  ex 
posed  to  the  perils  of  the  storms  and  all 
enemies  of  trees,  had  as  compensation  more 
of  the  sun,  more  places  for  birds  and  their 
nests,  more  beauty,  and  so  on.  I  told  him 
that  Balzac  expressed  the  same  idea  in  fewer 
words,  and  for  a  moment  he  looked  worried. 
Balzac  said,  "Our  children  are  our  hostages 
to  Fate/'  And  each  way  of  expressing  the 
similar  idea  is  characteristic  of  the  man.  In 
many  ways  Father  was  like  a  wide-spreading 
tree — his  intense  nature  was  one  that  caught 
all  the  sun  and  beauty  of  life,  enough  and 
more  to  compensate  for  the  sorrow  and 
pain  he  knew.  To  adventures  out-of-doors, 
the  rise  of  a  big  trout  to  his  fly,  the  sudden 
appearance  of  some  large  wild  animal,  how 
his  whole  nature  would  react!  He  was 


MY     FATHER  187 

well  aware  of  this  trait  and  often  spoke  of  it 
— in  fact,  he  had  no  desire  to  be  cold  and 
calculating  before  either  the  unusual  or 
beautiful  in  nature.  Something  as  illustrat 
ing  this  trait  of  his  comes  vividly  to  mind: 
one  early  March  day  I  was  out  duck  hunting 
here  on  the  Hudson  and  Father  was  watch 
ing  me  from  shore  with  field  glasses.  He 
was  sitting  in  a  sunny  nook  beside  the  high 
rocks  below  the  hill.  I  was  out  in  the 
drifting  ice  with  my  duck  boat,  which  I  had 
painted  to  resemble  a  cake  of  ice,  and  was 
very  carefully  paddling  up  on  a  flock  of 
about  a  hundred  Canada  geese.  When  I 
got  almost  within  range  I  found  my  lead  in 
the  ice  closed  and  could  not  get  nearer,  but 
that  near  by  there  was  another  lead  in  the 
ice  that  would  take  me  within  easy  range. 
To  get  to  this  lead  I  had  to  back  out  of  the 
one  I  was  in,  rather  a  ticklish  performance 
when  so  near  the  watchful  geese.  I  did  it, 
however,  and  as  I  remember  I  got  some 
geese.  But  Father  on  shore  could  not  see 
the  narrow  leads  in  the  great  fields  of  ice; 


1 88  MYFATHER 

he  saw  only  that  when  near  the  geese  1 
suddenly  began  to  drift  backward,  and 
judging  me  by  himself  he  said  afterward: 
"I  thought  when  you  saw  all  those  geese  so 
near  you  got  so  excited  you  were  overcome 
— or  something — and  were  lying  there  in  the 
bottom  of  that  boat,  helpless  in  the  ice!" 

The  following  three  letters  show  how  he 
watched  the  river  for  the  migrating  wild 
fowl: 

Saturday, 

Riverby,  Mch.  26,  [1898.] 
MY  DEAR  JULIAN, 

Your  letter  rec'd.  I  enclose  check  for  $10  as  I 
have  no  bills  by  me.  You  can  get  it  cashed  at 
Houghton,  Mifflin  Co.,  No.  4  Park  St. — ask  for  Mr. 
Wheeler.  Or  may  be  the  treasurer  of  the  college 
will  cash  it.  We  are  all  well  and  beginning  the 
spring  work.  Hiram  and  I  are  grafting  grapes, 
and  the  boys  are  tying  up  and  hauling  ashes.  The 
weather  is  fine  and  a  very  early  spring  is  indicated. 
1  have  not  seen  a  wild  goose  and  only  two  or  three 
flocks  of  ducks.  I  should  like  to  have  been  with 
you  at  the  Sportsman's  Fair.  If  you  make  those 
water  shoes  or  foot  boats  I  should  advise  you  to 
follow  copy — make  them  like  those  you  saw. 

Your  sentence  about  the  whispering  of  the  ducks' 
wings,  etc.,  was  good.  Ruskin  invented  that  phrase 


MYFATHER  189 

"the  pathetic  fallacy/'  You  will  probably  find  it 
in  your  rhetoric.  It  was  all  right  as  applied  to  your 
sentence. 

Susie  is  very  quick  witted. 

The  shad  men  are  getting  ready.  I  hope  you  will 
go  and  hear  the  lectures  of  the  Frenchman  Domnic. 
He  is  worth  listening  to.  I  shall  be  very  glad  when 
the  Easter  vacation  brings  you  home  once  more, 
you  are  seldom  out  of  my  thoughts.  I  made  two 
gallons  of  maple  syrup.  Walt  Dumont  has  an  auc 
tion  this  P.  M.  Nip  and  I  are  going. 

Your  loving  father, 
JOHN  BURROUGHS. 

Nip  was  a  fox  terrier  that  was  for  years 
Father's  constant  companion,  and  they  had 
many  adventures  together. 

Riverby, 

Mch.  8  [1898] 
MY  DEAR  JULIAN, 

I  wish  you  were  here  to  enjoy  this  fine  spring 
morning.  It  is  like  April,  bright,  calm,  warm,  and 
dreamy,  sparrows  singing,  robins  and  blue  birds 
calling,  hens  cackling,  crows  cawing,  while  now 
and  then  the  ear  detects  the  long  drawn  plaint  of 
the  meadow  lark.  The  ice  in  the  placid  river  floats 
languidly  by  and  I  dare  say  your  hunting  ground 
is  alive  with  ducks.  I  am  boiling  sap  on  the  old 
stove  set  up  here  in  the  chip  yard.  I  have  ten 


1 9O  MY     FATHER 

trees  tapped  and  lots  of  sap.  I  wish  you  had  some 
of  the  syrup.  Your  mother  came  back  yesterday 
and  she  is  now  busy  in  the  kitchen,  good  natured 
as  yet,  if  it  only  lasts.  She  has  hired  a  girl  who  is 
expected  soon.  Your  letter  came  yesterday.  No 
doubt  you  will  have  fun  acting  as  "supe"  with  the 
boys.  It  will  be  a  novel  experience.  Tell  me  all 
about  it.  A  note  from  Kennedy  says  he  saw  Trow- 
bridge  lately  and  that  T  is  going  to  ask  you  out  to 
see  him.  Go  if  he  asks  you,  he  is  an  old  friend  of 
mine  and  a  fine  man.  You  have  read  his  stories 
when  you  were  a  boy.  He  has  some  nice  girls. 
Remember  me  to  him  if  you  go. 

1  do  not  see  or  hear  any  ducks  lately,  I  think  they 
are  slow  in  coming.  But  I  must  stop.  Write  soon. 

Your  loving  father, 
JOHN  BURROUGHS. 

When  you  get  time  look  over  my  article  in  the 
March  Century.  I  think  the  style  is  pretty  good. 

West  Park    Mch  2    [1898] 
MY  DEAR  BOY, 

Your  letter  came  in  due  course  last  week  and  yes 
terday  your  mother  was  up  and  brought  me  your 
last  letter  to  her.  It  is  a  great  pleasure  to  know  you 
keep  well  and  in  good  heart  and  courage.  I  see 
you  have  pains  in  your  arms  which  you  vainly 
think  the  waists  of  girls  would  alleviate.  But  they 
would  not,  they  would  only  increase  the  pains. 
I  have  tried  it  and  I  know. 

It  is  quite  spring  like  here — blue  birds  and  clear 


M  Y     F  ATH  E  R  IQI 

bright  days  and  half  bare  ground  and  drying  roads 
and  cackling  hens.  Ice  still  in  the  river  down  to 
the  elbow. 

Keep  Lent  all  you  can — that  is  slow  up  in  your 
meat — not  more  than  once  a  day  at  most.  Your 
head  will  be  all  the  clearer.  I  am  very  well  since 
my  return  and  am  still  writing.  This  thought 
came  into  my  head  as  I  lay  in  bed  this  morning — 
You  go  to  college  for  two  things,  knowledge  and 
culture.  In  the  technical  schools  the  student  gets 
much  knowledge  and  little  culture.  The  sciences 
and  mathematics  give  us  knowledge,  only  literature 
can  give  us  culture.  In  the  best  history  we  get  a 
measure  of  both,  we  get  facts  and  are  brought 
in  contact  with  great  minds.  Chemistry,  physics, 
geology,  etc.,  are  not  sources  of  culture.  But 
Lessing,  Goethe,  Schiller,  Shakespeare,  etc.,  are. 
The  discipline  of  mathematics  is  not  culture  in  the 
strict  sense;  but  the  discipline  that  chastens  the 
taste,  feeds  the  imagination,  kindles  the  sympathies, 
clarifies  the  reason,  stirs  the  conscience  and  leads 
to  self-knowledge  and  self-control,  is  culture.  This 
we  can  only  get  from  literature.  Work  this  idea 
up  in  one  of  your  themes  and  show  that  the  highest 
aim  of  a  university  like  Harvard  should  be  culture 
and  not  knowledge. 

Your  mother  is  well  and  will  soon  be  back.  I  see 
no  ducks  yet.  Hiram  is  still  on  his  hives  and  the 
music  of  his  saw  and  hammer  sounds  good  in  my 
ears.  I  shall  tap  a  tree  to-day. 

Your  loving  father, 
J.  B. 


192  MYFATHER 

After  I  had  been  settled  in  Matthews 
Hall,  Cambridge,  for  a  time  Father  and 
Mother  came  to  Cambridge  to  see  me. 
Father  said  in  his  inimitable  way  that  he 
asked  Mother  if  she  would  go  to  this  place 
or  that,  and  she  said  "No"  to  each;  then 
when  he  suggested  Cambridge  she  said, 
"Yes."  When  they  returned  to  Riverby, 
in  the  still,  lonely  house,  they  missed  me, 
and  Father  wrote  of  it  all: 

Slabsides,  Oct.  16,  1897. 
MY  DEAR  JULIAN, 

.  .  .  We  reached  home  safely  Thursday  night 
after  a  dusty  ride  and  tiresome.  It  is  very  lonesome 
in  the  house.  I  think  we  both  miss  you  now  more 
than  we  did  before  we  left  home;  it  is  now  a  cer 
tainty  that  you  are  fixed  there  in  Harvard  and 
that  a  wide  gulf  separates  us.  But  if  you  will  only 
keep  well  and  prosper  in  your  studies  we  shall  endure 
the  separation  cheerfully.  Children  have  but  little 
idea  how  the  hearts  of  their  parents  yearn  over  them. 
When  they  grow  up  and  have  children  of  their  own, 
then  they  understand  and  sigh,  and  sigh  when  it  is 
too  late.  If  you  live  to  be  old  you  will  never  forget 
how  your  father  and  mother  came  to  visit  you  at 
Harvard  and  tried  so  hard  to  do  something  for  you. 
When  I  was  your  age  and  was  at  school  at  Ashland, 
father  and  mother  came  one  afternoon  in  a  sleigh 


MYFATHER  193 

and  spent  a  couple  of  hours  with  me.  They  brought 
me  some  mince  pies  and  apples.  The  plain  old 
farmer  and  his  plain  old  wife,  how  awkward  and 
curious  they  looked  amid  the  throng  of  young  people, 
but  how  precious  the  thought  and  the  memory 
of  them  is  to  me!  Later  in  the  winter  Hiram 
and  Wilson  came  each  in  a  cutter  with  a  girl  and 
stayed  an  hour  or  so.  ...  The  world  looks  lovely 
but  sad,  sad.  Write  us  often. 

Your  affectionate  father, 
J.  B. 

"When  it  is  too  late" — how  he  under 
stood,  how  broad  were  his  sympathies! 
What  anguish  those  words  must  cost  all 
of  us  at  some  time!  Father  understood, 
I  did  not — and  now  it  is  too  late. 

West  Park,  N.  Y., 

Nov.  7,  1897. 
MY  DEAR  JULIAN, 

If  you  will  look  westward  now  across  New  England 
about  seven  o'clock  in  the  evening  you  will  see  a  light 
again  in  my  study  window — a  dim  light  there  on 
the  bank  of  the  great  river — dim  even  to  the  eye 
of  faith.  If  your  eye  is  sharp  enough  you  will  see 
me  sitting  there  by  my  lamp,  nibbling  at  books  or 
papers  or  dozing  in  my  chair  wrapped  in  deep 
meditation.  If  you  could  penetrate  my  mind  you 
would  see  that  I  am  often  thinking  of  you  and  won- 


IQ4  MY     FATHER 

dering  how  your  life  is  going  there  at  Harvard  and 
what  the  future  has  in  store  for  you.  I  found  my 
path  from  the  study  grass  grown,  nearly  obliterated. 
It  made  me  sad.  Soon,  soon,  I  said,  all  the  paths 
I  have  made  in  this  world  will  be  overgrown  and 
neglected.  I  hope  you  may  keep  some  of  them  open. 
The  paths  I  have  made  in  literature,  I  hope  you  may 
keep  open  and  make  others  of  your  own. 

Your  affectionate  father, 

J.  B. 

It  was  always  a  source  of  disappointment 
to  Father  that  I  did  not  write  more,  that  I 
could  not  carry  on  his  work — but  this 
was  more  than  he  should  have  expected. 
He  was  an  essayist,  fired  with  a  literary 
ambition  that  never  faltered  or  grew  dim 
for  over  sixty  years.  Once  I  wrote  a  brief 
introduction  to  a  hunting  story  that  won  a 
prize  in  a  sporting  journal  and  I  can  never 
forget  how  pleased  Father  was  with  it — 
"It  filled  me  with  emotion,"  he  said,  "it 
brought  tears  to  my  eyes — write  a  whole 
piece  like  that  and  I'll  send  it  to  the 
Atlantic" 

How  he  loved  the  telling  phrase,  the 
turn  of  words  that  was  apt  and  made  the 


MYFATHER 

form  and  substance  one!  I  know  I  had  a 
little  silver  cup  or  mug  that  I  used  at  table, 
and  when  I  saw  my  first  locomotive  bell 
slowly  ringing  I  watched  it  and  exclaimed, 
"Cup  open  bell."  How  Father  did  laugh 
and  repeat  it  to  me  afterward — the  childish 
way  of  expressing  the  strange  and  new  in 
terms  of  the  familiar  and  old.  The  small 
son  of  a  friend  of  Father's  when  he  first 
saw  the  ocean  exclaimed,  "Oh,  the  great 
rainy!"  and  Father  would  laugh  over  this 
expression  and  slap  his  sides  in  glee.  The 
homely  expressions  always  pleased  him. 
One  day  some  children  came  to  see  him. 
They  had  been  sent  by  their  parents  with 
strict  instructions  to  see  "the  man  himself," 
and  when  they  asked  Father  if  he  was  "the 
man  himself"  he  had  a  good  laugh  and  told 
them  he  guessed  he  was.  He  always  liked 
to  tell  and  act  out  the  story  of  the  man  who 
went  down  into  the  cellar  for  a  pitcher  of 
milk.  In  going  down  he  fell  down  the  stone 
stairs  and  bruised  himself  painfully.  As 
he  lay  groaning  and  rubbing  himself  he 


196  MY    FATHER 

heard  his  wife  call,  "John,  did  you  break 
the  pitcher?"  Looking  about  in  his  anguish 
he  saw  the  pitcher,  unbroken.  "No," 
he  called  back,  gritting  his  teeth,  "but,  by 
thunder,  I  will,"  and  seizing  it  by  the 
handle  he  savagely  smashed  it  over  the 
stones.  And  Father  understood  exactly 
how  he  felt. 

The  deep  interest  he  took  in  self-knowledge 
is  well  shown  in  the  following  letter: 

Riverby,  Nov.  17,  1897. 
MY  DEAR  JULIAN, 

I  was  very  sorry  to  hear  of  that  "D"  and  "E." 
I  was  probably  quite  as  much  cut  up  as  you  were. 
I  have  been  melancholy  ever  since  I  heard  of  it. 
But  you  will  feel  better  by  and  by.  ...  One 
thing  you  are  greatly  lacking  in,  as  I  suppose  most 
boys  are — self-knowledge.  You  do  not  seem  to 
know  what  you  can  or  cannot  do,  or  when  you  have 
failed  or  succeeded.  You  have  always  been  fond 
of  trying  things  beyond  your  powers  (I  the  same) 
as  in  the  case  of  the  boat.  I  think  you  over  estimate 
yourself,  which  I  never  did.  You  thought  you 
ought  to  have  had  an  "  A"  in  English,  and  were  not 
prepared  for  your  low  mark  in  French  and  German. 
Do  a  little  self-examination  and  nip  the  bud  of 
conceit;  get  a  fair  estimate  and  make  it  too  low 
rather  than  too  high.  I  am  sure  I  know  my  own 


MY    FATHER  197 

weak  points,  see  if  you  can't  find  yours.  That 
saying  of  the  ancients,  "know  thyself/'  is  to  be 
pondered  daily.  I  always  keep  my  expectations 
down,  so  that  I  am  not  disappointed  if  I  get  a  "  D" 
or  an  "  E."  My  success  in  life  has  been  far  beyond 
my  expectations.  I  know  several  authors  who  think 
they  have  not  had  their  just  deserts;  but  it  is  their 
own  fault.  I  have  just  read  this  in  Macaulay: 
"  If  a  man  brings  away  from  Cambridge  [where  he 
graduated  in  eighteen  hundred  and  twenty-two] 
self-knowledge,  accuracy  of  mind  and  habits  of  strong 
intellectual  exertion  he  has  got  the  best  the  college 
can  give  him."  That  is  what  I  think  too. 

Your  loving  father, 

J.  B. 

Slabsides,  Oct.  27.    [1897.] 
MY  DEAR  BOY, 

I  found  your  letter  here  yesterday  on  my  return 
from  N.  J.  whither  I  had  gone  on  Saturday  to  visit 
Mr.  Mabie.  I  was  glad  to  hear  from  you.  You 
must  write  at  least  once  a  week.  Get  the  rowing 
pants  you  refer  to  and  anything  else  you  really  need. 
.  .  .  Do  not  try  to  live  on  less  than  $3. 50  a  week. 
Select  the  simplest  and  most  nourishing  food — 
meat  only  once  a  day — no  pie  but  fruit  and  puddings. 
The  weather  still  keeps  fine  here  and  dry;  no  rain 
yet  and  no  heavy  frosts. 

Celery  is  most  off;  not  more  than  $175  for  this 
second  crop.  I  am  taking  out  the  Niagaras  below 
the  hill — nothing  pays  but  Delawares  in  the  grape 
line.  I  have  had  a  good  deal  of  company  as  usual. 


198  MY    FATHER 

It  cheers  me  up  and  keeps  me  from  the  blue  devils. 
Your  mother  is  cleaning  house  and  groaning  as  usual. 
I  can  only  keep  my  temper  by  flight  to  SS. 

Hiram  goes  to  Roxbury  to-morrow  for  two  months 
or  more.  I  shall  miss  him  very  much.  He  stands 
to  me  for  father  and  mother  and  the  old  home.  He 
is  part  of  all  those  things.  When  he  is  here  my 
chronic  homesickness  is  alleviated. 

I  hope  you  will  do  some  reading  outside  of  your 
courses.  Read  and  study  and  soak  yourself  in  some 
great  author  for  his  style.  Try  Hawthorne  or 
Emerson  or  Ruskin  or  Arnold.  The  most  pregnant 
style  of  all  is  in  Shakespeare.  Go  into  the  laboratory 
some  day  and  have  your  strength  tested.  Binder 
says  they  can  tell  you  what  part  is  weakest.  Watch 
your  health  and  keep  regular  hours.  Write  us  as 
often  as  you  can.  How  I  wish  I  was  a  Harvard 
student  too. 

With  deepest  affection, 

JOHN  BURROUGHS. 

Doubtless  it  is  a  wise  provision  of  Nature 
that  we  find  our  mates  in  our  opposites. 
It  is  some  natural  law  working  for  the  good 
of  the  race,  something  to  maintain  the 
balance  and  uniformity  of  mankind.  Cer 
tainly  in  many  ways  two  people  could  not 
have  been  more  unlike  than  Father  and 
Mother.  She  said  he  was  as  weak  as  water, 


MY    FATHER  199 

and  he  said  he  could  get  tipsy  on  a  glass  of 
water.  He  always  said  that  Mother  made 
the  housekeeping  an  end  in  itself,  and  she 
said,  "You  know  how  he  is,  he  never 
takes  care  of  anything."  How  many  eve 
nings  have  I  spent  in  the  study  when  the 
lamp  would  begin  to  burn  low  for  lack  of 
oil  and  Father  would  have  to  run  and  fill 
it  and  Mother  would  complain,  "Just  like 
you,  come  mussing  around  after  dark. 
Why  didn't  you  fill  it  by  daylight?"  Ah, 
me,  when  it  was  daylight  Father  did  not 
need  the  lamp!  It  was  Mother  who  filled 
the  lamps,  trimmed  them  and  polished 
the  chimneys  regularly  in  the  afternoon, 
while  the  sun  was  still  up;  but  it  was  Father 
who  trimmed  and  filled  his  lamp  and  let  it 
so  shine  that  all  the  world  might  see! 
After  all,  I  am  not  sure  but  what  Mother 
was  just  the  wife  for  him;  he  had  a  streak 
of  stubborn  determination  along  with  his 
ambition  to  write  that  carried  him  through 
any  trials  of  housecleaning  or  complaints 
about  the  housework.  A  wife  in  full  sym- 


200  MY    FATHER 

pathy  with  his  work,  who  coddled  him  and 
made  him  think  that  everything  he  wrote 
was  perfect,  would  never  have  done  at 
all,  nor  would  a  selfish,  extravagant,  or 
society-mad  woman.  Father  was  tem 
peramental,  moody,  irritable,  easily  in 
fluenced,  easily  led,  suffering  at  times  with 
attacks  of  melancholy,  with  but  one  fixed 
purpose,  and  that  was  to  write.  Mother 
was  economical,  thrifty,  material,  suspicious 
of  people,  determined  to  bring  their  ship 
to  a  snug  harbour  before  old  age,  and  she 
took  the  best  of  care  of  Father  and  held 
him  steady  and  no  doubt  by  her  strength 
of  character  and  firmness  gave  strength 
and  firmness  to  his  life.  Their  last  years 
were  most  happy  together  and  filled  with 
a  sympathy  and  understanding  that  were 
beautiful. 

Sometimes  Father  would  talk  to  himself, 
though  but  very  seldom,  and  the  following 
two  letters  are  almost  as  though  he  were 
talking  to  himself.  "I  am  far  less  forlorn 
when  he  is  here/'  he  says  of  himself  and 


MY    FATHER  2OI 

Uncle  Hiram.  With  all  his  self-analysis  he 
did  not  see  that  being  forlorn  was  part  of 
the  price  he  must  pay  for  the  simple  but 
intense  joy  he  experienced  from  the  beauty 
of  life  and  Nature. 

W.  P..    Tuesday,  Jan.  25  [1897]. 
MY  DEAR  JULIAN, 

It  still  keeps  mild  here — snow  nearly  gone,  but  ice 
in  the  river  to  the  elbow.  We  do  not  get  away 
yet.  Your  mother  will  not  stir  and  Hiram  and 
I  will  probably  go  to  Slabsides,  as  she  wants  to 
shut  up  the  house. 

Hiram  came  a  week  ago  and  stays  and  eats  here  in 
the  study — I  am  far  less  forlorn  when  he  is  here. 
It  probably  seems  strange  to  you,  I  know  you  have 
never  looked  upon  him  very  kindly.  But  you 
have  never  seen  Hiram — not  the  Hiram  I  see. 
This  little  dull  ignorant  old  man  whom  you  have 
seen  is  only  a  transparent  mask  through  which  I 
see  the  Hiram  of  my  youth,  and  see  the  old  home, 
the  old  days  and  father  and  mother  and  all  the  life 
on  the  old  farm.  It  is  a  feeling  you  cannot  under 
stand,  but  you  may  if  you  live  to  be  old. 

I  hope  you  have  given  up  that  boat  crew  business 
by  this  time.  It  is  not  the  thing  for  you.  You 
do  not  go  to  Harvard  for  that.  As  I  wrote  you, 
you  have  not  the  athletic  temperament,  but  some 
thing  finer  and  better.  Good  sharp  daily  exercise 
you  need,  but  not  severe  training.  If  you  had  been 


202  MY     FATHER 

half  my  age  probably  those  cold  baths  would  have 
killed  you.  Old  men  often  die  in  the  cold  bath. 
The  blood  is  driven  in  and  makes  too  great  a  strain 
on  the  arteries.  Write  me  when  you  get  this  and 
tell  me  about  yourself. 

Your  loving  father, 

J.  B. 

Very  likely  what  I  did  write  told  Father 
much  more  than  1  suspected,  and  he  always 
stood  ready  with  any  advice  he  could 
give,  especially  about  matters  of  health. 
Those  were  the  years  when  he  had  many 
troubles :  insomnia,  neuralgia,  and  especially 
a  trouble  he  called  malaria,  but  which  was 
largely  autotoxemia.  One  doctor  seared  his 
arm  with  a  white-hot  iron  in  an  effort  to 
do  away  with  the  pain  of  the  neuralgia 
and  years  afterward  Father  would  laugh 
about  it — "just  like  African  medicine  man, 
driving  out  the  devils  in  my  arm  with  a 
white-hot  iron — the  trouble  was  not  there, 
it  was  the  poison  in  my  system  from 
faulty  elimination."  When  at  last  he  did 
discover  the  source  of  his  troubles  how 
happy  he  was ! 


MY     FATHER  203 

Riverby,  Feb.  3  [1898] 
MY  DEAR  JULIAN, 

Your  letter  came  this  morning.  Winter  is  rugged 
here  too.  Snow  about  20  inches  and  zero  weather 
at  night.  I  almost  froze  the  top  of  my  head  up 
there  in  the  old  house.  The  ice  men  are  scraping 
off  the  snow,  ice  8  or  9  inches.  Your  mother  is  in 
Poughkeepsie,  I  was  down  there  Monday  night. 
I  doubt  if  she  comes  to  Cambridge  and  I  am  wonder 
ing  whether  I  had  better  come  or  stay  here  and  save 
my  money.  If  you  can  come  home  on  the  Easter 
holidays  perhaps  I  had  better  not  come.  If  you 
get  a  week  had  you  rather  not  come  home  then  than 
to  have  me  come  now?  Tell  me  how  you  feel. 
But  I  may  feel  different  next  week,  1  may  be  written 
out  by  that  time.  If  I  thought  I  could  go  on 
with  my  work  there  I  would  come  at  once.  I  am 
in  excellent  health  and  do  not  need  a  change.  I 
could  not  do  much  with  your  English  Exams.  I 
have  a  poor  opinion  of  such  stuff.  That  is  not  the 
way  to  make  writers  or  thinkers.  I  enclose  my 
check  for  the  bill  which  you  must  get  receipted. 
Write  me  at  once  about  the  Easter  holidays. 

Your  loving  father, 
JOHN  BURROUGHS. 

Later  when  he  visited  me  in  Cambridge 
he  wrote  a  daily  theme,  and  I  copied  it  and 
handed  it  in  as  my  own,  and  it  promptly 
came  back  marked  "sane  and  sensible/' 


204  MY    FATHER 

the  instructor  quite  unconsciously  and  un 
knowingly  having  hit  upon  two  salient 
qualities  of  Father's  style.  I  remember 
the  theme  he  wrote  was  about  the  statue 
of  John  Harvard  who  sits  bareheaded  in 
the  open,  exposed  to  all  weathers.  Father 
said  he  always  wanted  to  go  and  hold 
something  over  him  to  keep  off  the  snow 
or  sun.  The  life  he  led  here  and  the  sur 
roundings  could  not  produce  other  than 
wholesome  and  sane  writing.  The  old 
house  spoken  of  was  the  original  farmhouse 
that  stood  up  near  the  road — it  was  torn 
down  in  1903  and  a  new  cottage  put  up 
just  below  it.  Father  and  I  spent  one 
summer  there  when  we  rented  Riverby  to 
New  York  people  and  he  spent  time  there 
later  as  for  instance: 

Saturday  p.  M., 

Jan.  29(1898]. 
MY  DEAR  JULIAN, 

Hiram  and  I  are  with  the  Ackers  [who  were  living 
in  the  old  house  then].  I  find  the  food  and  give 
them  the  rent  and  they  do  the  work.  I  shall  have 
peace  now  and  it  will  taste  good.  If  I  come  to  C 


MY    FATHER  2O5 

when  would  you  rather  I  should  come?  I  am  not 
done  with  my  writing  yet  but  may  be  in  eight  or 
ten  days.  Writing  is  like  duck  hunting,  one  doesn't 
know  what  game  he  will  get  or  when  he  will  be  back: 
that  is  why  I  am  undecided.  I  make  everything 
wait  upon  my  writing.  It  is  cold  here,  down  to 
four  two  mornings;  good  sleighing.  I  rec'd  your 
letter  yesterday,  I  do  not  know  about  those  plays 
— ask  Mr.  Page  or  Rodman.  I  hope  you  are  prosper 
ing  in  your  exams.  This  is  the  new  pen,  do  not  like 
it  much  yet.  The  prospect  for  an  ice  harvest 
brightens.  Write. 

Your  loving  father, 

J.  B. 

W.  P., 

Saturday  Jan  15  [1898] 
MY  DEAR  JULIAN, 

I  was  glad  to  get  your  letter  and  to  see  you  in 
such  high  feather.  I  hope  you  will  keep  so.  Watch 
your  health  and  habits  and  you  may.  Still  your 
letter  did  not  give  me  unmixed  satisfaction.  If 
you  knew  how  I  dislike  slang,  especially  the  cheap 
vulgar  kind,  you  would  spare  me  the  affliction  of 
it.  There  is  slang  and  slang.  Some  has  wit  in  it 
some  is  simply  a  stupid  perversion  of  language.  The 
latter  I  dislike  as  I  do  the  tobacco  habit  to  which  it 
is  close  akin.  You  had  so  far  escaped  the  tobacco 
habit  and  I  had  hoped  you  would  escape  the  slang 
habit.  It  is  not  a  bit  more  manly  than  the  cigaret 
or  cigar.  Some  slang  phrases,  like  "you're  not  in 
it"  or  "you're  off  your  trolley"  and  others,  may  do 


206  MY     FATHER 

in  familiar  conversation  with  friends,  but  "bunches 
of  cold"  or  "cuts  no  ice"  etc.,  are  simply  idiotic. 
When  you  write  return  me  again  the  postal  card 
that  I  may  see  what  words  I  misspelled.  It  still  keeps 
very  mild  here,  but  is  snowing  this  morning.  Nip 
and  I  have  had  some  fine  skating — like  a  mirror  for 
over  a  mile  here  in  front:  but  the  ice  is  getting  thin. 
1  do  not  know  when  I  will  come  to  Cambridge. 
Your  mother  has  just  been  passing  through  the  win 
ter  solstice  of  her  temper  and  declares  she  is  not 
going  anywhere.  I  shall  get  away  by  and  by, 
even  if  she  stays  here.  1  read  Balzac  and  enjoyed 
it.  The  first  half  is  much  the  best.  The  ending  is 
weak  and  absurd.  The  old  miser  is  clearly  and 
strongly  drawn,  so  are  most  of  the  characters. 
But  we  do  not  pity  or  sympathize  with  the  heroine. 
How  large  and  fine  is  that  New  Paltz  girl,  but 
probably  like  a  big  apple,  she  lacks  flavour.  .  .  . 
Your  affectionate  father, 
J.  B. 

It  was  very  easy  to  see  why  Father  dis 
liked  slang — it  was  a  perversion  of  his  art, 
and  as  I  have  said  he  had  the  true  pride 
of  the  craftsman  in  his  art.  No  one  loved 
more  the  apt  and  witty  expression;  he  was 
forever  seeking  them,  and  slang  was  some 
thing  that  overstepped  the  bounds  and  was 
therefore  something  truly  abhorrent.  Often 


MY    FATHER  207 

I  have  heard  him  tell  the  story  with  de 
lighted  relish  of  some  men  who  were  spend 
ing  a  winter  night  in  a  country  hotel. 
Eugene  Field  I  think  it  was  who  made  the 
remark  that  so  delighted  Father,  and 
J.  T.  Trowbridge  recounts  it  in  "My  own 
Story."  It  was  a  bitter  cold  night  and 
covers  were  scanty;  and  more  than  that, 
there  were  several  panes  out  of  the  window. 
Field  rummaged  about  in  the  closet  and 
found  the  hoops  of  an  old  hoop  skirt,  just 
then  going  out  of  fashion,  and  these  he 
hung  over  the  broken  window,  saying  "That 
will  keep  out  the  coarsest  of  the  cold!" 
"Coarsest  of  the  cold/'  Father  would 
repeat  the  expression  and  laugh  again.  I 
remember  his  envious  acknowledgment  of 
an  apt  illustration:  two  famous  wood 
choppers  were  chopping  in  a  match  to  see 
which  could  fell  his  tree  first,  and  so 
great  was  their  skill  and  so  swift  their  blows 
that  the  chips  literally  poured  out  of  the 
tree  as  though  it  had  sprung  a  leak.  "That 
is  good,"  he  said  of  the  phrase  and  lowered 


208  MY    FATHER 

his  eyes.  Once  we  were  motor-boating 
upon  the  Champlain  Canal  and  we  were  de 
layed  all  day  by  the  numbers  of  slow  canal 
boats.  Yet  some  of  the  lock  tenders  said 
business  was  very  slack.  One  of  our  party 
commented  upon  this  and  said  that  there 
were  enough  canal  boats  as  it  was,  that  the 
canal  seemed  pretty  well  gummed  up  with 
them.  "  Pretty  well  gummed  up  with  them/' 
Father  repeated  over  and  over  and  laughed 
like  a  child  each  time.  Often  I  complained 
about  the  stone  house  at  Riverby,  that 
Father  in  planning  it  did  not  plan  to  use 
the  winter  sunshine;  not  only  were  the 
windows  not  placed  right  but  there  were 
spruce  trees  in  the  way.  "You  write  a 
book  on  'Winter  Sunshine'  and  you  let 
none  in  your  house/'  I  told  him  and  he  said 
that  if  he  had  the  winter  sunshine  in  his 
house  he  might  not  have  written  the  book. 
A  statement  which  has  a  large  element  of 
fundamental  truth,  at  least  in  his  case. 

In  those  days  we  had  much  fun  skating; 
Father  had  a  curious  pair  of  old  skates  that 


MY    FATHER  2CK) 

he  fastened  on  a  pair  of  shoes  so  that  they 
would  not  come  off.  These  shoes  he  tucked, 
skates  and  all,  under  his  arm  and  we  were 
off.  He  would  slip  off  his  "Congress" 
shoes  and  slip  on  the  shoes  with  skates 
attached  and  start  over  the  ice,  his  dog 
running  by  his  side.  Once  he  rigged  up 
an  attempt  at  a  sail  with  one  of  his  army 
blankets  and  some  pieces  of  moulding  left 
over  from  building  the  study,  but  it  would 
not  work.  People  on  shore  said  they 
thought  it  was  some  kind  of  a  life-saving 
contraption  in  case  he  broke  through  the 
ice.  One  day  in  the  Shataca  we  had  as 
fine  a  skate  as  we  ever  could  imagine — 
there  had  been  a  thaw  with  high  water  and 
Black  Creek  had  flooded  the  swamp,  the 
water  going  out  over  the  heavily  timbered 
Shataca  back  to  the  upland.  This  had 
then  frozen  and  the  water  gone  out  from 
under  it,  leaving  the  glassy  ice  hanging 
from  the  boles  of  the  trees.  The  ice 
sagged  a  little  between  the  trees  which  gave 
one  a  most  delightful  up  and  down  motion 


2IO  MY    FATHER 

as  they  glided  over  it  on  skates,  as  near 
flying  as  one  could  imagine  at  that  time. 

In  spirit  and  often  in  fact  Father  went  to 
college  with  me,  he  attended  lectures  in  the 
courses  I  was  taking,  and  often  when  I  had 
read  a  book  required  I  sent  the  copy  on  to 
him  to  read  and  he  would  comment  upon  it. 
In  the  following  letter  he  comments  upon  a 
book  I  had  sent  him,  and  draws  at  the  same 
time  a  picture  of  days  at  Slabsides : 

Slabsides, 

Sunday,  May  22  [1898]. 
MY  DEAR  SON, 

The  other  day  when  I  went  home  your  mother 
"jumped"  me  about  two  things, — my  going  down  to 
R's  to  lunch  and  my  taking  you  to  that  5  cent  show 
in  Boston.  .  .  . 

Heavy  thunder  showers  here  Thursday  night, 
cloudy  to-day.  Pretty  warm  the  last  three  days. 
The  Primus  is  a  great  success.  It  uses  rather  more 
than  one  half  cent's  worth  per  hour.  The  Van  B's 
with  two  Vassar  girls  were  just  over  here.  The 
"Iceland  Fisherman"  is  a  sweet  tender  pathetic  story. 
One  does  not  forget  Yann:  and  what  a  picture  of 
the  life  of  those  fishermen!  I  did  not  know  that 
France  had  such  an  industry.  I  paddled  up  Black 
Creek  again  on  Friday,  but  saw  no  ducks.  .  .  . 
There  were  35  people  here  last  week.  Write  what 


MYFATHER  211 

you  conclude  to  do  about  your  room.    The  woods 
are  nearly  in  full  leaf  now. 

Your  loving  father  —  J.  B. 

Comparing  the  life  of  Father's  boyhood 
with  our  life  here  at  Riverby  in  those  days 
and  again  comparing  that  with  the  life 
to-day,  one  cannot  but  wonder  what  will 
be  the  final  outcome.  In  a  primitive 
society  every  individual  knows  everything 
about  everything  that  he  has  in  life;  as 
civilization  becomes  more  complex  we  be 
come  more  and  more  specialists,  more  and 
more  the  thing  that  the  economists  call  the 
"division  of  labour"  becomes  operative, 
and  individuals  go  through  life  to-day 
knowing  how  to  do  but  a  very  few  of  the 
things  necessary  to  their  existence.  The 
early  or  primitive  civilization  produced  an 
independent  race,  and  individuals  pictu 
resque  and  unique  in  character.  Father  no 
ticed  this.  He  loved  the  old-fashioned 
man  or  woman  who  was  so  strongly  individ 
ual  and  picturesque.  I  remember  one  such 
character,  "Old  blind  Jimmy "  he  was 


212  MY    FATHER 

called,  who  went  about  the  country  with  a 
staff,  and  when  Father  saw  him  coming, 
one  day  "out  home,"  he  asked  me  to  run 
with  my  camera  and  station  myself  down 
the  road  and  get  a  picture  of  old  blind 
Jimmy  as  he  came  along.  I  did  so,  and  I 
knew  at  once  that  Jimmy  knew  I  was  there. 
He  must  have  heard  me  in  some  way,  and 
surely  must  have  heard  the  purr  of  the  focal 
plane  shutter  as  I  took  his  picture.  One 
day  in  the  market  place  in  Jamaica,  West 
Indies,  there  was  a  savage-looking  man 
who  looked  the  way  you  would  imagine  a 
pirate  of  the  Spanish  Main  would  look, 
and  Father  was  much  interested  in  him  and 
asked  me  to  get  his  picture — it  took  con 
siderable  manoeuvring,  but  I  did  get  him 
at  last. 

Much  of  the  old  order  clung  to  us  here 
at  Riverby — Mother  always  made  buck 
wheat  cakes,  we  got  a  sack  of  flour  from 
"out  home"  and  she  set  the  cakes  to  rise; 
I  can  hear  the  sound  of  the  wooden  spoon 
as  she  mixed  them  up  in  the  evening  and 


MY    FATHER  213 

then  set  them  behind  the  stove.  Now  we 
get  the  flour  all  ready  to  mix  with  water. 
No  more  running  for  buttermilk  to  use  in 
them,  no  more  having  them  rise  over  the 
batter  pitcher  during  the  night.  Father 
always  ate  them,  five  or  six.  No  day  was 
begun  in  cold  weather  without  "pancakes." 
And  "out  home"  they  made  their  own  soap, 
but  here  Mother  got  a  box  of  soap  and  care 
fully  piled  it  up  to  dry  and  harden.  There 
was  a  pail  in  the  cellar  for  "soap  grease," 
into  which  was  put  every  scrap  of  fat  or 
grease  and  saved  until  the  day  when  the 
"soap  man"  came  around  and  bought  it. 
Those  were  the  days  when  potatoes  were 
less  than  fifty  cents  a  bushel,  eggs  a  dollar 
a  hundred,  and  the  very  finest  roe  shad 
could  be  had  for  twenty-five  cents.  And 
shad  nets  were  knit  by  hand.  I  can  re 
member  Father  telling  how  the  Manning 
family,  who  lived  below  the  hill,  knit  shad 
nets  all  winter.  Now  one  can  buy  the  net 
already  knit  practically  as  cheaply  as  one 
can  buy  the  twine.  Sail  boats  dotted  the 


214  MY    FATHER 

Hudson — sloops  and  schooners  loitering 
up  and  down  the  river  or  tacking  noisily 
back  and  forth.  I  know  they  used  to  get 
becalmed  and  tide-bound  out  here  and 
the  sailors  would  come  ashore  and  raid  fruit 
orchards.  Once  some  of  them  stole  a  sheep 
and  took  it  out  to  the  schooner.  The  owner 
of  the  sheep  came  after  the  sailors  with  a 
search  warrant  but  the  mischievous  sailors 
pulled  the  anchor  chain  up  taut  and  tied 
the  sheep  to  the  chain  and  lowered  away 
until  the  sheep,  which  they  had  butchered, 
was  under  water  and  the  search  warrant 
even  could  not  find  it. 

"The  little  boat"  referred  to  in  the  letter 
of  July  24,  1893,  and  on  which  Father  ship 
ped  his  peaches,  was  a  small  steamer  that  ran 
from  Rondout  to  Poughkeepsie  and  was 
more  or  less  of  a  family  institution  when 
the  river  was  open.  It  landed  when  we 
hailed  it,  at  the  dock  at  the  bottom  of 
our  vineyard,  and  Father  mostly  went 
to  town  to  do  his  shopping  on  "the  little 
boat/'  Once  he  went  to  get  his  garden 


MY     FATHER  215 

seeds  and,  coming  back,  a  violent  squall 
blew  his  basket  with  all  his  purchases 
overboard.  I  can  still  remember  how  dis 
gusted  and  ruffled  he  appeared  over  it.  At 
another  time  he  was  on  this  little  boat 
when  it  landed  at  Hyde  Park  and  a 
team  of  horses,  hitched  to  a  big  wagon 
loaded  with  brick,  were  standing  on  the 
dock.  They  became  frightened  and  began 
to  back,  in  spite  of  the  efforts  of  the  driver 
to  stop  them.  In  a  moment  the  rear 
wheels  went  over  the  edge  of  the  dock  and 
then  when  they  felt  the  terrible  backward 
pull  of  the  wagon  they  sprang  ahead  in  a 
desperate  and  vain  effort  to  save  them 
selves.  Their  hoofs  beat  frantically  upon 
the  plank,  throwing  up  a  shower  of  splinters, 
and  though  they  strained  every  fibre  of 
their  bodies,  they  were  drawn  over  to  their 
death.  Father  was  much  upset  over  it.  It 
made  a  vivid  impression  on  him.  "But," 
he  said,  "there  was  a  priest  who  sat  near 
me  and  who  hardly  saw  it;  he  paid  no  more 
attention  than  if  nothing  had  happened," 


2l6  MY    PATH  ER 

and  I  feel  that  all  priests  suffered  on  that 
account  in  Father's  estimation! 

One  of  the  ceremonies  here  at  Riverby 
was  the  bringing  in  of  the  door  mat  at  night. 
Mother  did  this  or  told  me  to  do  it — I  doubt 
that  Father  would.  It  was  brought  in  for 
fear  of  dampness  or  rain  during  the  night, 
which  would  wet  the  mat  and  shorten  its 
usefulness.  How  different  from  housekeep 
ing  nowadays ! 

Father  always  wore  flannel  shirts,  of  a 
dark  gray,  and  these  had  the  unfortunate 
habit  of  shrinking  about  the  neck,  so  in 
washing  them  they  were  stretched  and 
then  dried  over  a  milk  pail — I  can  see 
them  now,  hanging  on  the  line  with  the  pail 
protruding  from  the  neck.  I  played  a 
cruel  joke  on  Father  one  night;  I  was 
going  out  to  the  hired  man's  house  to  play 
cards  and  asked  Father  to  leave  the  door 
open  for  me,  which  he  did.  It  was  very 
late  when  I  returned,  half-past  nine  or  ten 
o'clock,  and  as  I  did  not  want  to  disturb 
any  one  I  crept  in  in  my  most  stealthy 


MY    FATHER  21J 

way  and  up  to  bed.  In  the  morning 
Father  asked  me  excitedly  when  I  got  in. 
"You  must  have  been  mighty  sly  about  it," 
he  said,  half  in  admiration,  half  in  reproach, 
when  I  told  him,  "for  I  lay  awake  listening 
for  you  to  come  in  and  when  it  got  to  be 
after  ten  I  got  up  to  come  down  and  see 
what  had  become  of  you  and  I  found  you 
had  come  in." 

It  is  ever  true  that  many  of  the  things 
that  a  man  regards  as  important  a  woman 
does  not;  and  conversely,  many  things  a 
woman  takes  seriously  are  to  a  man  a  joke. 
The  following  gives  a  picture  of  the  life  here 
then  and  sums  up  the  difference  between 
the  point  of  view  of  Father  and  Mother: 

Thursday,  May  1 7  [  1 900] 
MY  DEAR  BOY, 

I  meant  to  have  written  you  before  this  but  I 
have  been  very  much  occupied  and  your  mother 
has  been  wrestling  with  her  house.  She  has  gotten 
down  to  the  kitchen  with  her  cleaning.  She  has 
hired  a  woman  who  is  to  come  next  week  and  she 
wants  to  get  the  house  in  order  for  her.  I  have  had 
company.  On  Friday  afternoon  "Teddy  Roosevelt 
Jr"  came  and  stayed  until  Monday  morning.  He 


2l8  MY     FATHER 

is  his  father  in  miniature.  He  kept  me  on  the  stretch 
all  the  time.  On  Saturday  we  went  up  the  Shataca 
and  cooked  our  dinner  on  the  little  island  where 
you  and  1  did.  We  had  a  good  time.  He  climbed 
trees  and  rocks  like  a  squirrel.  He  was  all  the  time 
looking  for  something  difficult  to  do. 

May  19.  I  was  choked  off  here  and  now  I  am 
in  a  pickle.  We  began  to  fix  the  cistern  yesterday 
and  got  it  half  finished  when  the  rain  came — an 
inch  and  a  half  of  water  and  your  mother  is  furious 
— cried  all  night  and  is  crying  and  storming  yet  this 
morning.  Of  course  the  blame  is  all  mine.  I  wanted 
to  fix  it  ten  days  ago  but  she  said  no,  she  wanted 
the  water  to  clean  house.  If  I  and  you  had  both 
died  she  could  not  have  shed  more  tears  than  she 
has  over  this  petty  matter.  I  shall  take  to  Slab- 
sides  to  escape  this  tearful  deluge.  It  has  been  very 
dry,  no  rain  and  no  tears  for  six  weeks.  I  was  glad 
to  see  it  come,  cistern  or  no  cistern.  It  has  saved 
the  hay  crop  and  the  strawberries. 

The  leaves  are  all  out  here  and  the  apple  blossoms 
fallen.  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Johnson  of  N.  Y.  came 
Sunday  and  left  Monday  night.  Clifton  Johnson 
came  Tuesday  morning  and  left  Wednesday.  Some 
Vassar  people  were  coming  to-day  but  it  rains  from 
the  N.  E. 

Of  course  you  can  pick  up  no  decent  girl  on  the 
street  and  I  should  keep  aloof  from  them.  A  decent 
girl  would  resent  the  advances  of  a  stranger. 

The  birds  are  very  numerous  this  spring. 

Your  loving  father 
J.  B. 


MY     FATHER  219 

In  the  spring  of  '99  Father  was  asked  to 
join  the  E.  H.  Harriman  Alaska  Expedition, 
and  though  very  reluctant  he  consented 
to  go — he  was  historian  of  the  expedition 
and  his  account  of  it  appeared  in  the 
Century  and  in  his  book,  "Far  and  Near/' 
Mother  had  always  said  that  "his  folks" 
were  afraid  to  go  out  of  sight  of  the  smoke 
of  the  home  chimney.  Something  of  this 
was  in  Father.  He  had  to  make  himself 
go.  He  was  always  unhappy  when  leaving 
home  and  home  ties.  He  made  many  new 
friends  on  this  trip — John  Muir,  whom  he 
liked  immensely  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  he 
sometimes  called  him  a  "cross-grained 
Scotchman";  Fuertes,  the  nature  artist; 
Dallenbaugh,  one  of  those  who  made  the 
trip  through  the  Grand  Canyon  with  Major 
Powell  and  who  wrote  "A  Canyon  Voyage" ; 
Charles  Keeler,  the  poet,  and  many  others. 

Near  Fort  Wrangell,  Alaska 

.,  „  June  5  [1890]. 

MY  DEAR  BOY, 

Still  we  steam  northward  through  these  wonder 
ful  channels  and  mountain-locked  sounds  that  mark 


22O  MY    FATHER 

this  side  of  the  continent  amid  such  scenery  as  you 
and  I  never  dreamed  of.  This  morning  we  woke 
up  at  Fort  Wrangell  under  a  clear  cold  sky,  like  a 
Florida  winter,  some  of  them  said,  mercury  44 
and  snow  capped  peaks  all  around  the  horizon. 
On  shore  some  wild  flowers  were  blooming  and  weeds 
and  shrubs  had  a  good  start.  I  saw  swallows  and 
heard  song  sparrows,  not  differing  much  from 
those  at  home.  We  have  had  fair  weather  most  of 
the  time  since  leaving  Victoria  but  cold.  I  have 
borrowed  a  heavy  overcoat  and  wish  I  had  two. 
I  sit  at  the  door  of  my  state  room  writing  this  and 
looking  out  upon  the  blue  sparkling  sea  water  and 
the  snow  capped  and  spruce  mantled  mountain 
ranges.  Muir  has  just  passed  by,  then  Mr.  Harri- 
man  racing  with  his  children.  I  like  him.  He  is  a 
small  man,  about  the  size  of  Ingersoll  and  the  same 
age,  brown  hair  and  moustache  and  round  strong 
head.  He  seems  very  democratic  and  puts  on  no 
airs.  1 1  A.  M.  We  are  now  going  up  the  Wrangell 
narrows  like  the  highlands  of  the  Hudson,  25  miles 
long  with  snow  capped  peaks  in  the  back-ground 
and  black  spruce  clad  hills  and  bends  in  the  fore 
ground.  Ducks,  geese,  loons,  and  eagles  all  along. 
Bang,  bang,  go  the  rifles  from  the  deck,  but  noth 
ing  is  hurt.  It  is  clear  and  still.  How  I  wish 
for  you!  Last  night  at  nine  thirty  we  had  such 
a  sun-set ;  snow  white  peaks  seven  or  eight  thou 
sand  feet  high  riding  slowly  along  the  horizon 
behind  dark  purple  walls  of  near  mountain  ranges 
all  aflame  with  the  setting  sun.  Such  depths  of 
blue  and  purple,  such  glory  of  flame  and  gold,  such 


MY    FATHER  221 

vistas  of  luminous  bays  and  sounds  I  had  never 
dreamed  of. 

I  keep  well  but  eat  better  than  I  sleep.  Only 
two  or  three  times  have  we  felt  the  great  throb 
of  the  Pacific  through  open  gateways  in  this  wall  of 
islands.  The  first  time  it  made  me  miss  my  dinner, 
which  is  not  as  bad  as  to  lose  it.  In  a  week  or  two 
we  shall  have  to  face  it  for  many  days;  then  I  shall 
want  to  go  home.  We  have  seen  deer  and  elk  from 
the  steamer.  We  have  reached  the  land  of  Indians 
and  ravens.  Many  Indians  in  every  town  and 
ravens  perched  in  rows  upon  the  house  tops.  Our 
crowd  is  fearfully  and  wonderfully  learned — all 
specialists.  I  am  the  most  ignorant  and  the  most 
untravelled  man  among  them,  and  the  most  silent. 
We  expect  to  reach  Juneau  to-night  and  I  may  be 
able  to  write  once  more — from  Sitka. 

I  wish  I  knew  if  you  were  going  west  and  how 
things  are  at  home.  I  suppose  you  will  be  home 
before  this  can  reach  you.  I  wonder  if  you  have  had 
rain  and  if  the  grapes  are  breaking.  I  got  me  a 
stunning  pair  of  shoes  at  Seattle — $7.50.  Down  in 
the  belly  of  our  ship  are  fat  steers,  2  horses,  a  cow, 
a  lot  of  sheep,  hens,  chickens,  turkeys,  etc.  It  looks 
like  a  farmer's  barn  yard  down  there.  But  I  must 
stop,  with  much  love  to  you  and  your  mother.  J.  B. 

We  have  just  passed  the  Devil's  Thumb,  over 
9,000  feet  high.  From  the  top  rises  a  naked  shaft 
1600  feet  high — this  is  the  thumb.  Our  first  glacier, 
too  is  here,  a  great  mass  of  whitish  ice  settled  low 
in  the  lap  of  the  mountains. 


222  MY    FATHER 

From  Sitka,  June  iyth,  he  wrote: 

MY  DEAR  BOY, 

The  steamer  yesterday  did  not  bring  me  a  lettei 
from  you  or  your  mother.  I  was  much  disappointed. 
If  you  had  written  as  late  as  June  3rd  it  would  have 
reached  me.  I  got  one  from  Hiram,  he  is  well  and 
his  bees  are  doing  well.  There  will  be  no  other 
chance  to  get  letters  until  we  return  the  last  of  July. 
I  dreamed  of  you  last  night  and  you  told  me  the 
grapes  were  not  doing  well.  I  read  in  the  papers 
of  the  heat  in  the  east  and  we  all  wish  for  some  of  it 
here.  I  got  me  a  heavy  flannel  shirt  here  and  I  feel 
warmer.  The  mercury  is  from  52  to  55  to-day. 
Dandelions  are  just  past  the  height  of  their  bloom, 
currant  bushes  just  blooming,  peas  are  up  ten  inches 
and  weeds  have  a  good  start.  There  is  no  agricul 
ture  in  Alaska,  though  potatoes  do  well.  I  have 
seen  one  cow,  a  yoke  of  oxen  and  a  few  horses. 
There  are  no  roads  except  about  one  mile  here. 
The  streets  of  most  of  the  towns  are  only  broad  plank 
sidewalks.  Yet  hens  scratch  here  and  roosters 
crow  the  same  as  at  home.  This  tcwn  is  very 
prettily  situated;  back  of  it  rise  steep,  dark  spruce- 
covered  mountains,  about  3,000  feet — in  front  of 
it  a  large  irregular  bay  studded  with  tree-tufted 
islands,  beyond  that  ten  miles  away  rise  snow  capped 
peaks,  from  the  top  of  which  one  could  look  down 
upon  the  Pacific.  No  land  has  been  cleared  except 
where  the  town  stands.  There  may  be  1,500  people 
here,  half  of  them  Indians.  The  Indians  are  well 
clad  and  clean  and  quiet  and  live  in  good  frame 


MYFATHER  223 

houses.  Many  of  them  are  half  breeds.  The  forests 
are  almost  impassable  on  account  of  logs,  brush, 
moss  and  rocks.  We  have  nothing  like  it  in  the 
east.  The  logs  are  as  high  as  your  head  and  the  moss 
knee  deep.  There  are  plenty  of  deer  and  bears  here. 
Day  before  yesterday  one  of  Mr.  Harriman's  daugh 
ters  shot  a  deer.  There  are  four  nice  girls  in  the 
party  from  sixteen  to  eighteen,  as  healthy  and  jolly 
and  unaffected  as  the  best  country  girls — two  of 
Mr.  Harriman's,  a  cousin  of  theirs,  and  a  friend,  a 
Miss  Draper.  Then  there  are  three  governesses 
and  a  trained  nurse. 

This  is  a  land  of  ravens  and  eagles.  The  ravens 
perch  on  the  houses  and  garden  fences  and  the  eagles 
are  seen  on  the  dead  trees  along  shore.  The  barn 
swallow  is  here  and  the  robin  and  red-start.  One 
day  we  went  down  to  the  hot  springs  and  I  drank 
water  just  from  Hades:  it  reeked  with  its  sulphur 
fumes  and  steamed  with  its  heat.  I  wish  we  had 
such  a  spring  on  board,  it  would  help  warm  us.  I 
have  met  a  Hyde  Park  man  here,  De  Graff.  I  have 
met  four  people  here  who  read  my  books  and  two 
at  Juneau  and  one  at  Skagway.  We  leave  here  to 
night  for  Yakutat  Bay,  30  hours  at  sea.  I  should 
be  quite  content  to  go  home  now  or  spend  the  rest 
of  the  time  in  the  west.  I  would  give  something 
to  know  how  things  are  with  you — the  vineyards 
and  the  celery  and  what  your  plans  are  and  your 
mother's.  I  still  eat  and  sleep  well  and  am  putting 
on  flesh.  Love  to  you  both.  Let  me  find  letters 
at  Portland  in  July.  Your  loving  father,  J.  B. 


224  MY    FATHER 

Near  Orca,  Prince  William  Sound, 

Alaska,  June  27  [1899]. 
MY  DEAR  JULIAN, 

Since  I  wrote  you  at  Sitka  we  have  come  further 
north  and  spent  five  days  in  Yakutat  Bay  and  since 
Saturday  in  this  sound — have  seen  innumerable 
glaciers  and  lofty  mountains  and  wild  strange 
scenes.  At  Yakutat  we  went  into  Disenchantment 
Bay,  30  miles  where  no  large  steamer  had  ever  gone 
before.  This  bay  is  a  long  slender  arm  of  the  sea 
which  puts  out  from  the  head  of  Yakutat  Bay  and 
penetrates  the  St.  Elias  range  of  mountains.  It  was 
a  weird  grand  scene.  Birds  were  singing  and  flowers 
were  blooming  with  snow  and  ice  all  about  us.  I 
saw  a  single  barn  swallow  skimming  along  as  at  home. 
There  were  many  Indians  hunting  seal  among  the 
icebergs. 

In  coming  on  here  the  ship  rolled  a  good  deal  and 
I  was  not  happy,  though  not  really  sick.  On  Satur 
day  we  entered  this  sound  in  clear  sunshine  and  the 
clear  skies  continued  Sunday  and  Monday.  This 
morning  it  is  foggy  and  misty.  We  steamed  eighty 
miles  across  the  sound  on  Sunday  in  the  bright  warm 
sunshine  over  blue  sparkling  waters.  How  we  all 
enjoyed  it!  Far  off  rose  lofty  mountains  as  white 
as  in  midwinter,  next  to  them  a  lower  range  streaked 
with  snow  and  next  to  them  and  rising  from  the 
water  a  still  lower  range,  dark  with  spruce  forests. 

Orca,  where  we  anchored  Saturday  night,  is  a  small 
cluster  of  houses  on  an  arm  of  the  sound  where  they 
can  salmon,  immense  numbers  of  them.  Two 
hundred  men  are  employed  there  at  this  season. 


MYFATHER  225 

The  salmon  run  up  all  the  little  rivers  and  streams, 
some  of  our  party  have  shot  them  with  rifles.  Camp 
ing  parties  go  out  from  the  ship  to  collect  birds  and 
plants  and  to  hunt  bears  and  to  stay  two  or  three 
nights.  No  bears  have  as  yet  been  seen.  I  stick 
to  the  ship.  The  mosquitoes  are  very  thick  on  shore 
and  besides  that  my  face  has  troubled  me  a  good 
deal,  till  the  sunshine  came  on  Sunday.  I  must  have 
a  taste  of  camp  life  on  Kadiak  Island,  where  we  ex 
pect  to  be  eight  or  ten  days.  Yesterday  we  found 
many  new  glaciers  and  two  new  inlets  not  down  on 
the  largest  maps.  We  are  now  anchored  to  pick 
up  a  camping  party  we  left  on  Sunday.  Near  us 
are  two  islands  where  two  men  are  breeding  blue 
foxes,  their  skins  bring  $20.  We  have  seen  one 
Eskimo  here  in  his  kyack.  One  can  read  here  on 
deck  at  eleven  o'clock  at  night.  We  have  set  our 
watches  back  six  hours  since  leaving  New  York. 
1  am  rather  dainty  now  about  my  eating,  but  keep 
well.  I  dreamed  last  night  again  about  home  and 
that  the  grapes  were  a  failure.  I  hope  dreams 
do  go  by  opposites.  I  suppose  you  are  shipping 
the  currants.  We  get  no  mail.  I  hope  to  send 
this  by  a  steamer  from  the  north,  said  to  be  due. 
We  have  lectures  and  concerts  and  games  and  the 
people  enjoy  themselves  much.  I  keep  aloof  much 
of  the  time.  I  hope  you  both  keep  well.  Love  to 
you  both.  J.  B. 

From  Kadiak  Father  wrote  of  the  "epi 
demic   of  verse   writing"    that   broke  out 


226  MY    FATHER 

among  the  members  of  the  expedition.  It 
was  the  custom  to  hang  the  verses  up  in 
the  smoking  room,  and  on  that  fact,  even, 
Father  later  wrote  some  doggerel.  It  was 
while  on  this  expedition  that  he  wrote, 
"Golden  Crowned  Sparrow  in  Alaska,"  one 
verse  especially  : 

But  thou,  sweet  singer  of  the  wild, 

I  give  more  heed  to  thee; 
Thy  wistful  note  of  fond  regret 

Strikes  deeper  chords  in  me. 

seems  so  strangely  pathetic  and  like  many 
of  his  moods. 

Kadiak,  July  5,  '99. 
MY  DEAR  JULIAN, 

In  trying  to  get  off  last  night  the  ship  got  aground 
and  must  wait  for  high  tide.  I  wrote  to  your  mother 
yesterday.  It  is  bright  and  lovely  this  morning, 
ihe  mercury  at  70 — it  is  hot.  I  send  you  a  jingle. 
Several  of  the  men  write  doggerel  and  put  it  up 
in  the  smoking  room,  so  I  am  doing  it  too.  Mine 
is  best  so  far.  We  will  soon  be  off  now,  I  trust  you 
are  well.  I  try  not  to  worry. 

Bow  westward  faithful  steamer 
And  show  the  east  your  heels 

New  conquests  lie  before  you 
In  far  Aleutian  fields 


MY    FATHER  22? 

Kick  high,  if  high  you  must 

But  don't  do  so  at  meals, 

Oh  don't  do  so  at  meals. 
Your  swinging  it  is  graceful 

But  I  do  detest  your  reels. 

We're  bound  for  Unalaska 

And  we  do  not  care  who  squeals 

But  mend  your  pace  a  little 
And  show  the  east  your  heels 

But  in  your  waltzing  with  old  Neptune 
Don't  forget  the  hours  of  meals 
Don't  forget  the  hours  of  meals 

I'm  sure  you  have  no  notion 
How  dreadful  bad  it  feels! 

Push  onward  into  Bering 

And  hasten  to  the  seals 
One  glance  upon  their  harems 

Then  take  unto  your  heels 
More  steam  into  your  boilers 

More  vigor  in  your  wheels 
But  in  flirting  with  the  billows 

Oh  regard  the  hours  of  meals 

Do  regard  the  hours  of  meals. 
If  in  this  we  are  exacting 

Please  remember  how  it  feels. 

We're  bound  for  Arctic  waters 

And  for  the  midnight  sun 
Then  quicken  your  propeller 

And  your  pace  into  a  run 


228  MY    FATHER 

We'll  touch  at  lone  Siberia 

To  take  a  polar  bear 
Then  hie  away  through  Bering  Straits 

And  more  frigid  regions  dare 
But  in  all  thy  wild  cavorting 

Oh  don't  forget  our  prayer 

A  noble  task's  before  us 

And  we'll  do  it  ere  we  go 
We'll  cut  the  Arctic  circle 

And  take  the  thing  in  tow 
And  put  it  round  the  Philippines 

And  cool  'em  off  with  snow. 
Our  boys  will  hail  our  coming, 

But  a  chill  will  seize  the  foe. 
And  we'll  end  the  war  in  triumph 

Go  you  homeward  fast  or  slow. 

Kadiak,  July  2,  1899. 

Though  this  was  a  delightful  trip,  one 
might  say,  an  ideal  trip,  he  was  homesick, 
sea  sick,  and,  as  he  says  of  himself,  of  all 
the  party  the  most  ignorant,  the  most 
untravelled,  the  most  silent.  It  was  a 
new  experience  to  him,  this  going  with  a 
crowd.  I  know  he  often  spoke  of  the 
expedition's  cheer,  and  how  they  would  all 
give  it  when  they  came  into  stations — 


MY    FATHER  22Q 

Who  are  we ! 

Who  are  we! 

We're  the  Harriman,  Harriman 
H.  A.  E.!    H.  A.  E.! 

and  "how  the  people  would  stare  at  us!" 
Father  said.  He  liked  it,  this  jolly  com 
radeship  and  crowd  spirit,  but  it  was  new 
to  him,  almost  painfully  new,  and  though 
no  one  had  more  human  sympathy,  more 
tenderness  and  understanding  with  human 
weaknesses  and  shortcomings,  no  one  had 
less  of  the  crowd  spirit.  As  he  said,  he  kept 
aloof — not  from  aloofness  but  from  embar 
rassment  and  shyness.  Later  he  overcame 
most  of  this  and  was  able  to  face  a  crowd 
or  an  audience  with  composure  and  sureness. 
With  this  picture  in  mind  another  is  recall 
ed,  one  of  him  here  at  Riverby  on  summer 
days,  scraping  corn  to  make  corn  cakes. 
With  an  armful  of  green  corn  that  he  had 
picked,  I  can  see  him  seated  and  with  one 
of  Mother's  old  aprons  tucked  under  his 
beard.  He  would  carefully  cut  down  the 
rows  of  kernels  and  then  with  the  back  of 


230  MY     FATHER 

a  knife  would  scrape  the  milk  of  the  corn 
into  a  big  yellow  bowl.  He  would  hold 
the  white  ears  in  his  brown  hands  and 
deftly  cut  each  row,  a  look  of  composure 
and  serenity  in  his  eyes.  He  could  eat  his 
share  of  the  cakes,  too,  and  I  like  to  think 
of  those  summer  days.  That  fall  he  wrote 
from  Slabsides : 


Nov.  30,  1899 
MY  DEAR  JULIAN, 

1  am  over  here  this  morning  warming  up  and  mak 
ing  ready  for  dinner.  Hud  and  his  wife  and  your 
mother  are  coming  over  soon.  We  are  to  have  a 
roast  duck  and  other  things  and  I  shall  do  the 
roasting  and  baking  here.  I  wish  you  were  here  too. 
It  is  a  cloudy  day,  but  still  and  mild.  I  keep  pretty 
well  and  am  working  on  my  Alaska  trip — have  al 
ready  written  about  ten  thousand  words.  The 
Century  paid  me  $75  for  two  poems — three  times 
as  much  as  Milton  got  for  "Paradise  Lost."  The 
third  poem  I  shall  weave  into  the  prose  sketch. 
The  N.  Y.  World  sent  a  man  up  to  see  me  a  couple 
of  weeks  ago  to  get  me  to  write  six  or  seven  hundred 
words  for  their  Sunday  edition.  They  wanted  me 
to  write  on  the  Thanksgiving  turkey!  Offered  me 
$50 — they  wanted  it  in  two  days.  Of  course  I  could 
not  do  it  off-hand  in  that  way.  So  I  fished  out  of  my 
drawer  an  old  MS,  that  I  had  rejected  and  sent  that. 


MYFATHER  231 

They  used  it  and  sent  me  $30.     It  was  in  the  Sunday 
World  of  Nov.  19. 

I  have  sold  four  lots  here  for  $22  5.  One  house 
will  be  started  this  fall.  Wallhead  and  Millard  of  P. 
If  I  don't  look  out  I  will  make  some  money  out  of  this 
place  yet.  Your  mother  begins  to  look  more  kindly 
upon  it.  A  N.  Y.  sculptor  has  bought  the  rock  be 
yond  the  spring  for  $75.  Van  and  Allie  are  ditching 
and  cleaning  the  swamp  of  the  Italians  below  here. 

Photography  is  not  an  art  in  the  sense  that  paint 
ing  or  music  or  sculpture  is  an  art.  It  is  nearer  the 
mechanical  arts.  Nothing  is  an  art  that  does  not 
involve  the  imagination  and  the  artistic  perceptions. 
All  the  essentials  of  photography  are  mechanical 
— the  judgment  and  the  experience  of  the  man  are 
only  secondary.  A  photograph  can  never  be  really 
a  work  of  art.  You  can  put  those  statements  in 
the  form  of  a  syllogism. 

I  hope  you  are  better  of  your  cold.  Some  build 
ing  burned  up  in  Hyde  Park  early  last  night.  Robert 
Gill  shot  himself  in  N.  Y.  the  other  day— -suicide. 
We  shall  be  very  glad  to  see  you  again. 

Your  loving  father, 

J.  B. 

A  long  line  of  ducks  just  flew  over  going  north. 

The  last  letter  from  Slabsides  was  on  May 
23,1900: 

MY  DEAR  BOY, 

I  am  here  surrounded  by  the  peace  and  sweetness 
of  Slabsides.  I  came  here  Saturday  morning  in  the 


232  MY    FATHER 

rain.  It  is  a  soft,  hazy  morning,  the  sun  looking 
red  through  a  thin  layer  of  seamless  clouds.  Amasa 
is  hoeing  in  the  celery,  which  looks  good,  and  the 
birds  are  singing  and  calling  all  about.  I  have  got 
to  go  to  N.  Y.  this  afternoon  to  a  dinner.  I  had 
much  rather  stay  here,  but  I  cannot  well  get  out  of  go 
ing.  ...  I  begin  to  feel  that  I  could  get  to  writing 
again  if  I  was  left  alone.  I  want  to  write  a  Youth's 
Companion  piece  called  "Babes  in  the  Woods" 
about  some  young  rabbits  and  young  blue  birds 
Teddy*  and  I  found. 

Did  you  row  in  the  races?  What  race  are  you 
preparing  for  now?  It  is  bad  business.  The  doctors 
tell  me  that  those  athletic  and  racing  men  nearly 
all  have  enlargement  of  the  heart  and  die  young. 
When  they  stop  it,  as  they  do  after  their  college  days, 
they  have  fatty  degeneration.  In  anything  we  force 
nature  at  our  peril. 

When  you  are  in  Boston  go  into  Houghton 
Mifflin  Co.  and  tell  them  to  give  you  my  last  book 
"The  Light  of  Day"  and  charge  to  me.  There  is 
some  good  writing  in  it.  Your  loving  father, 

J.  B. 

*[The  son  of  President  Roosevelt.] 

When  I  graduated  at  Harvard  of  course 
Father  was  there  and  he  went  to  the  base 
ball  game  and  other  things — we  had  a  lit 
tle  reception  in  my  room  in  Hastings.  In 
the  yard  one  day  one  of  the  old  classes 


MY    FATHER  233 

came  along  and  among  them  was  the  new 
Vice-President,  Theodore  Roosevelt,  and 
everyone  cheered.  "Yes/'  said  Father, 
as  we  stood  there  that  bright  June  day, 
"Teddy  takes  the  crowd" — how  little  did 
he  know  the  future,  or  guess  that  some  day 
he  would  write  a  book  "Camping  and 
Tramping  with  Roosevelt"!  Jacob  Reid 
has  said  that  no  one  who  really  knew  Roose 
velt  ever  called  him  Teddy,  and  I  know  it 
was  so  in  Father's  case.  On  his  trip  to 
the  Yellowstone  with  the  President,  Father 
wrote: 

r  In  South  Dakota,  April  6,  7  p.  M. 
DEAR  JULIAN, 

We  are  now  speeding  northward  over  Dakota 
prairies.  On  every  hand  the  level  brown  prairie 
stretches  away  to  the  horizon.  The  groups  of  farm 
buildings  are  from  one  half  to  a  mile  apart  and  look 
as  lonely  as  ships  at  sea.  Spots  and  streaks  of  snow 
here  and  there,  fallen  this  morning.  A  few  small 
tree  plantations,  but  no  green  thing;  farmers  plowing 
and  sowing  wheat;  straw  stacks  far  and  near;  miles 
of  corn  stubble,  now  and  then  a  lone  school  house; 
the  roads  a  black  line  fading  away  in  the  distance, 
the  little  villages  shabby  and  ugly.  When  the  train 
stops  for  water  a  crowd  of  men,  women,  and  children 


234  MY    FATHER 

make  a  rush  for  the  President's  car.  He  either 
speaks  to  them  a  few  minutes  or  else  gets  off  and 
shakes  hands  with  them.  He  slights  no  one.  He  is 
a  true  democrat.  He  makes  about  a  dozen  speeches 
per  day,  many  of  them  in  the  open  air.  As  his 
friend  and  guest  I  am  kept  near  him.  At  the  ban 
quets  I  sit  at  his  table;  on  the  platforms  I  sit  but  a 
few  feet  away,  in  the  drives  I  am  in  the  fourth 
carriage.  If  I  hang  back  he  sends  for  me  and  some 
nights  comes  to  my  room  to  see  how  I  have  stood 
the  day.  In  St.  Paul  and  Minneapolis  there  were 
fifty  thousand  people  on  the  sidewalks.  As  we  drove 
slowly  along  through  the  solid  walls  of  human  beings 
I  saw  a  big  banner  borne  by  some  school  girls  with  my 
name  upon  it.  As  my  carriage  came  up  the  girls 
pushed  through  the  crowd  and  hurriedly  handed  me 
a  big  bouquet  of  flowers.  The  President  saw  it  and 
was  much  pleased.  .  .  .  Other  things  like  that 
have  happened,  so  you  can  see  your  dad  is  honored 
in  strange  lands — more  than  he  is  at  home.  .  .  . 
I  see  prairie  chickens  as  we  speed  along,  and  a  few 
ducks  and  one  flock  of  geese.  .  .  .  It  is  near 
sundown  now  and  I  see  only  a  level  sea  of  brown 
grass  with  a  building  here  and  there  on  the  rim  of  the 
horizon.  .  .  .  We  are  well  fed  and  I  have  to  look 
out  or  I  eat  too  much.  You  can  see  that  the  world 
is  round  up  here.  Your  affectionate  father, 

J.  B. 

How  well  I  can  see  Father's  expression 
as  he  wrote  that  line,  "  Your  dad  is  honoured 


MY     FATHER  235 

in  strange  lands — more  than  he  is  at  home  " ! 
and  I  sympathize  with  him  fully.  It  has 
always  been  thus,  that  people  of  genius 
are  least  appreciated  in  their  own  home. 
And  yet  few  men  have  the  patience  and 
gentleness  that  he  had;  few  were  as  easy 
to  get  along  with.  He  asked  little  for 
himself  and  was  generous  with  what  was 
his,  and  generous  to  the  faults  or  short 
comings  of  others.  I  remember  in  one  of 
those  early  March  days  the  school  boys 
raided  his  sap  pans  and  Father  chased  and 
caught  them,  and  as  he  overhauled  one 
boy,  the  boy  exclaimed  pantingly,  "I 
didn't  touch  your  sap,  Mr.  Burris!"  and 
Father  laughed  over  it.  "The  little  rascal 
was  all  wet  down  his  front  then  with  sap!" 
Father  would  then  tell  the  story  of  the  boy 
in  school  who  was  seen  by  his  teacher  eating 
an  apple.  "I  saw  you  then,"  exclaimed 
the  teacher.  "Saw  me  do  what?"  said  the 
boy.  "Saw  you  bite  that  apple."  "  I  didn't 
bite  any  apple,"  replied  the  boy.  "Come 
here,"  and  as  the  boy  came  up  the  teacher 


236  MY    FATHER 

opened  his  mouth  and  took  out  a  big  chunk 
of  apple.  "I  didn't  know  it  was  there/' 
promptly  said  the  boy.  Father  would  al 
ways  laugh  at  that:  he  sympathized  with 
the  boy.  Yet  when  he  taught  school  he 
had  a  big  bundle  of  "gads"  as  he  called 
them  and  he  hid  them  in  the  stove  pipe, 
where  the  boys  failed  to  find  them.  I 
remember  how  Mother  said  that  one  boy 
imposed  upon  Father's  good  nature  too  far, 
and  then  when  Father  did  finally  get  angry 
he  got  furious  and  grabbed  the  boy,  who 
hung  on  his  desk,  and  Father  took  him 
desk  and  all,  tearing  the  desk  from  its  floor 
fastenings.  Doubtless  afterward  he  was 
very  sorry  he  had  let  his  temper  "get  the 
better"  of  him,  as  he  would  express  it. 

In  those  days  we  often  went  for  a  swim, 
either  in  the  river,  or  over  to  the  swimming 
pool  in  Black  Creek.  Father  was  a  good 
swimmer  but  he  would  never  dive — he 
said  it  always  seemed  to  him  that  there 
would  be  many  water  soldiers  down  there 
holding  up  spears,  and  one  would  be 


MY    FATHER  237 

impaled  upon  them  if  he  dived.  Many 
times  I  have  asked  myself  just  how  he 
looked  in  those  days  when  he  was  so  strong 
and  active.  There  was  something  very 
natural  about  him,  a  thin  white  skin  that 
bled  easily  at  a  scratch;  fine  hair  that  grew 
well  and  was  wavy;  a  fine-grained,  fluid 
kind  of  body,  like  the  new  growth  of 
ferns  or  new  shoots  of  willows;  medium 
size  hands,  broad  and  brown,  with  fingers 
bent  from  milking  when  he  was  a  small  boy; 
picturesque  in  dress,  everything  soft  and 
subdued  in  colour.  Someone  once  said 
that  his  style  in  literature  was  slovenly, 
and  Father  said  that  that  was  true.  "I 
am  slovenly  in  my  dress  and  all  I  do,  so  no 
doubt  my  style  is  slovenly  also."  Though 
this  may  seem  to  be  a  harsh  criticism,  it 
is  true  in  the  sense  that  Nature  he  elf  is 
slovenly,  slovenly  in  contrast  to  what  is 
stiff  and  artificial.  His  eyes  were  grayish 
brown,  light,  with  a  hint  of  green.  His 
voice  was  soft  and  when  he  was  embarrassed 
he  stammered;  he  would  force  the  words  out, 


238  MY    FATHER 

with  a  little  hesitation;  then  when  the 
word  did  come  it  was  quick  and  forced. 
In  the  same  way  his  long-enduring  pa 
tience,  when  once  it  did  become  exhausted 
the  temper  came  out  in  full  measure.  Often 
he  was  the  one  who  suffered — more  often, 
I  should  say.  In  the  following  letter  he 
refers  to  the  broken  bone  in  his  hand,  a 
long  and  painful  break,  that  caused  him 
months  of  suffering.  One  day  when  chop 
ping  wood  on  his  wood  pile  by  the  study  a 
small  stick  irritated  him,  it  would  not  HQ, 
still,  but  rolled  about  and  dodged  the  axe 
until  in  fury  Father  managed  to  strike  it. 
The  stick  flew  back  and  in  some  way  broke 
the  bone  in  his  right  hand  that  goes  to  the 
knuckle  of  the  index  finger,  which  he  used  in 
writing. 

At  Home,  Feb.  12  [1907]. 
DEAR  JULIAN, 

Your  letter  was  forwarded  me  from  M.  I 
got  here  early  Monday  morning.  I  got  my  teeth 
Saturday.  I  feel  as  if  I  had  a  tin  roof  in  my  mouth, 
cornice  and  all.  I  don't  know  how  I  can  ever  endure 
them,  they  are  horrible.  .  .  . 


MY     FATHER  230 

I  took  your  Hobo  piece  to  Dr.  Barrus  and  she  read 
it  to  Miss  C  and  me,  they  were  both  delighted 
with  it,  even  enthusiastic.  Forest  and  Stream  has  re 
turned  your  piece.  I  enclose  their  letter.  I  have  read 
the  paper.  It  is  not  anywhere  near  as  good  as  your 
Hobo  sketch — has  not  the  same  sparkle,  buoyancy, 
and  go.  You  can  make  it  better.  In  such  an  ac 
count  you  must  put  a  spell  upon  your  reader  and  to 
do  this  you  must  go  more  into  detail  and  be  more 
deeply  absorbed  yourself. 

My  hand  is  nearly  well.  Three  doctors  in  M 
agreed  that  I  had  broken  a  bone.  .  .  .  Love  to 
you  all, 

J.  B. 

Father  always  took  a  most  lively  interest 
in  the  few  magazine  articles  I  wrote  and 
though  he  would  never  " correct "  a  MS. 
he  would  tell  why  it  was  good  or  bad,  and 
if  it  was  good  it  gave  him  the  greatest 
pleasure.  Once  when  I  wrote  an  article 
called  "Making  Hens  Lay"  and  showed 
him  the  cheque  I  received  for  it,  he  ex 
claimed,  "  That  is  the  way  to  make  hens  lay ! " 
Though  he  often  said  that  if  he  wrote  what 
the  editors  wanted  him  to  write,  very  soon 
they  would  not  want  what  he  did  write,  he 
replied  to  my  saying  that  Verdi's  most 


240  MY     FATHER 

popular  opera  was  written  to  order,  that 
a  similar  request  from  an  editor  gave  him 
a  hint  from  which  he  wrote  one  of  his  best 
essays.  The  controversy  which  Father 
started  and  which  President  Roosevelt 
joined  and  in  which  he  coined  the  phrase 
"nature  fakers"  did  Father  much  good  in 
that  it  quickened  his  thoughts  and  stimu 
lated  him  in  many  ways.  He  received 
many  abusive  letters,  which  only  amused 
and  entertained  him,  and  in  all  it  made  a 
most  interesting  episode.  In  one  of  his 
letters  from  Washington  he  wrote:  "At 
the  Carnegie  dinner  I  met  Thompson  Seton. 
He  behaved  finely  and  asked  to  sit  next 
me  at  dinner.  He  quite  won  my  heart/' 
That  was  March  31,  1903.  In  checking 
up  the  statements  made  by  the  "nature 
fakers  "  Father's  own  power  of  observation 
was  much  sharpened  and  he  became  more 
alert.  And  receiving  pay  for  articles  that 
he  wrote  on  the  subject  was  an  added 
source  of  fun;  it  was  like  spoils  captured 
from  the  enemy.  I  remember  well  one 


MYFATHER  241 

day  on  the  Champlain  Canal  we  stopped 
at  noon  and  Father  said  hilariously:  " We'll 
all  go  to  the  hotel  for  dinner.  We  won't 
bother  to  cook  dinner,  we'll  let  the  nature 
fakers  pay  for  our  dinner!"  Like  everyone 
else  he  had  his  blind  side,  things  he  looked 
at  without  seeing,  things  that  had  no 
interest  or  message  for  him.  On  March  i, 
1908,  he  wrote:  "That  slip  in  the  Outlook 
letter  irritates  me.  But  any  one  can  see 
it  was  a  slip  of  the  pen — nothing  can  drift 
to  windward — things  drift  to  leeward.  I 
see  how  they  are  laughing  at  me  in  the  last 
number/' 

One  first-hand  observation  Father  made 
I  can  never  forget.  The  joke  was  entirely 
on  him,  but  he  laughed  and  saw  only  the 
nature  facts.  In  going  up  to  Maine  on  a 
fishing  expedition  we  had  to  wait  for  hours 
in  the  woods  at  a  junction.  While  waiting 
we  went  down  to  a  fall,  where  the  brown 
waters  of  a  small  river  poured  down  over 
many  ledges  of  sandstone.  In  this  sand 
stone  were  worn  many  pot-holes,  some  of 


242  MY     FATHER 

them  perfect,  and  of  all  sizes.  In  one  about 
the  size  of  a  butter  tub  was  a  sucker,  a 
measly  fish  about  a  foot  long.  Nothing 
else  to  do,  Father  pulled  off  his  coat  and 
rolled  up  his  sleeves,  and  getting  down 
on  his  knees  he  began  to  chase  this  sucker 
about  the  pot-hole  to  catch  him.  The 
sucker  went  around  and  around  very  delib 
erately  until  just  the  right  moment  arrived 
when,  with  a  sudden  burst,  he  threw  at  least 
half  the  water  in  the  pool  into  Father's 
face.  The  sucker  went  down  with  the 
miniature  flood  to  a  larger  pot-hole  below. 
Father  was  soaked,  choked,  strangled,  and 
blinded  with  the  water,  but  when  he  had 
shaken  himself  and  blown  the  water  from 
his  mouth  and  nose  and  wiped  his  eyes  he 
said:  "Now  if  that  had  been  a  trout  he 
would  have  been  so  rattled  that  he  would 
have  jumped  right  out  here  on  the  rocks, 
but  you  see  you  can't  rattle  a  sucker!" 

There  was  one  subject  that  Father  al 
ways  took  seriously,  and  that  was  the  ques 
tion  of  his  diet.  In  his  youth  he  had  known 


MY     FATHER  243 

nothing  of  proper  diet,  and  though  the  whole 
some,  home-made  food  on  the  farm  had  been 
the  best  possible  thing  for  him,  in  his  early 
manhood  he  had  been  most  intemperate 
in  his  eating — "eating  a  whole  pie  at  one 
sitting/'  he  said.  He  loved  to  recall  that 
when  he  had  the  measles  he  was  ordered 
by  the  doctor  to  drink  nothing,  and  when  his 
thirst  got  to  an  unbearable  point  he  arose, 
dressed,  climbed  out  of  the  bedroom  window 
and  got  some  lemonade,  of  which  he  drank 
about  a  quart — "and  I  got  well  at  once/' 
he  would  add  with  a  laugh.  I  wrote  some 
verses  about  his  eating  experiments  and  I 
never  knew  whether  he  was  amused  or  hurt. 
He  said  rather  soberly,  the  only  mention 
he  ever  made  of  them:  "I  have  a  new  rule 
now,  so  you  can  add  another  verse  to  your 
poem/' 

Mother  was  taken  sick  in  Georgia,  where 
she  and  Father  were  spending  the  winter, 
the  winter  of  1915-16,  and  in  March,  1917, 
she  died  here  at  West  Park.  Father  had 
gone  away.  Though  we  all  knew  she 


244  MY    FATHER 

could  not  recover,  we  all  thought  she  would 
live  until  he  returned,  but  she  did  not,  and 
from  Cuba,  where  the  news  reached  him, 
he  wrote  a  beautiful  tribute.  Later,  after 
his  return,  we  laid  her  to  rest  among  her 
family  in  the  little  cemetery  in  Ton  Gore, 
the  town  where  Father  first  taught  school 
so  many  years  ago.  One  by  one  he  had 
seen  his  family  go,  and  many  of  his  friends. 
I  remember  that  when  I  told  him  of  a  prin 
cess  whom  Carlyle  said  outlived  her  own 
generation  and  the  next  and  into  the  next, 
he  said,  "How  lonely  she  must  have  been!" 
and  much  of  this  loneliness  came  into  his 
sighs  and  into  his  thoughts  as  he  felt  himself 
nearing  the  grave.  As  he  sat  at  his  desk 
in  the  little  study,  his  feet  wrapped  in  an 
old  coat,  an  open  fire  snapping  in  the  fire 
place,  his  pen  turned  more  and  more  to  the 
great  question.  Even  in  1901  he  wrote 
from  Roxbury,  at  the  time  of  the  death 
of  his  sister  Abigail : 

I  am  much  depressed,  but  must  not  indulge  my 
grief,  our  band  of  brothers  and  sisters  has  not  been 


MY    FATHER  245 

broken  since  Wilson  died,  thirty-seven  years  ago. 
Which  of  us  will  go  next?  In  the  autumn  weather 
in  the  autumn  of  our  days  we  buried  our  sister  beside 
her  husband. 

In  the  same  letter,  from  his  own  ex 
perience  he  says : 

I  can  understand  your  want  of  sympathy  with 
the  new  college  youth.  You  have  learned  one  of 
the  lessons  of  life,  namely,  that  we  cannot  go  back — 
cannot  repeat  our  lives.  There  is  already  a  gulf  be 
tween  you  and  those  college  days.  They  are  of  the 
past.  You  cannot  put  yourself  in  the  place  of  the 
new  men.  The  soul  constantly  demands  new  fields, 
new  experiences. 

In  1905  he  wrote: 

In  this  mysterious  intelligence  which  rules  and 
pervades  nature  and  which  is  focussed  and  gathered 
up  in  the  mind  of  man  and  becomes  conscious  of  it 
self — what  becomes  of  it  at  death?  Does  it  fall  back 
again  into  nature  as  the  wave  falls  back  into  the 
ocean,  to  be  gathered  up  and  focussed  in  other 
minds? 

During  Mother's  last  illness  she  was 
tenderly  cared  for  by  an  old  friend  of  the 
family,  Dr.  Clara  Barrus,  who  then  took 


246  MY    FATHER 

up  the  burden  of  caring  for  Father,  not  only 
safeguarding  his  health,  but  helping  him  in 
his  literary  work  as  well. 

On  November  23,  1921,  we  said  good-bye 
in  the  station  in  Poughkeepsie.  1  looked 
forward  to  seeing  him  in  the  spring  with 
so  much  joy.  But  he  was  very  sad,  and  his 
hand  felt  frail  in  mine.  His  last  letter, 
written  in  a  broken,  running  hand,  so 
different  from  the  swift,  virile  up-and-down 
hand  of  thirty  years  ago,  came  from 
California,  where  he  was  urging  me  to  join 
the  party. 

So  characteristic  of  him  and  of  his  love 
of  a  dog  and  all  the  homely  things  is  the 
line  "Scratch  Jack's  back  for  me."  I  had 
written  him  that  I  was  anxious  to  see  smoke 
coming  out  of  his  study  chimney  once  more, 
and  this  simple  thought  gave  him  much 
pleasure.  But  it  was  not  to  be. 

La  Jolla,  California,  Jany.  26  [1921] 
DEAR  JULIAN, 

Your  letters  come  promptly  and  are  always  very 
welcome.  We  ail  keep  well.  Eleanor  is  back 


MY    FATHER  247 

again  and  is  driving  the  car.  Ursie  is  getting  fat, 
she  drinks  only  filtered  water,  as  we  all  do.  I  have 
had  attacks  of  my  old  trouble,  but  a  dose  of  Epsom 
salts  every  morning  is  fast  curing  me  of  them.  It 
is  still  cold  here  and  has  been  showery  for  a  week 
or  two.  Shriner  is  painting  my  portrait  and  has 
got  a  fine  thing. 

We  are  booked  to  return  on  Mch.  25th.  We  shall 
go  to  Pasadena  Feb.  3rd,  our  address  there  will  be 
Sierra  Madre.  It  is  about  six  miles  from  Pasadena 
in  Pasadena  Glen.  How  I  wish  you  could  be  here 
for  those  last  two  months.  Yesterday  Shriner  took 
us  for  a  long  drive  over  in  El  Cajon  valley  and  we 
saw  a  wonderful  farming  country,  the  finest  I  have 
yet  seen  in  California,  miles  of  orange  and  lemon 
orchards  and  grape  vines  and  cattle  ranches.  For 
the  past  week  we  can  see  snow  on  the  mountains 
nearer  by  than  I  have  ever  seen  it.  We  can  just 
see  the  peak  of  old  Baldie,  white  as  ever.  As  I 
write  a  big  airplane  is  going  north  out  over  the  sea. 

I  wish  you  would  have  Taroni  or  some  one  bring 
me  a  load  of  wood  for  my  study  fire. 

I  am  bidding  farewell  to  La  Jolla  and  California. 
I  never  expect  to  return :  it  is  too  far,  too  expensive, 
and  too  cold.  I  long  to  see  the  snow  again  and  to 
feel  a  genuine  cold  and  escape  from  this  "aguish" 
chill.  I  hope  you  all  keep  well.  Scratch  Jack's 
back  for  me.  Love  to  Emily  and  Betty  and  John. 

Your  loving  father, 

J.  B. 

THE   END 


10  ^rUTrenewed  «  appUcati 

SS^TStaJS**. 


9 


^ 

10^ 


" 


14  1932 


lOw-4,'23 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 


